VLC Media Player 1.1.0 released

The VideoLAN Project developers have announced the availability of version 1.1.0 of their popular VLC Media Player, code named "The luggage". VLC is a free open source cross-platform multimedia player for various audio and video formats. Compared to the previous 1.0.x 'Goldeneye' branch of VLC, this major point release of VLC includes a number of updates, changes and new features.

VLC 1.1.0 features support for the latest open WebM / VP8 video format introduced by Google as part of the WebM Project and for GPU decoding on Vista, Windows 7 and Linux systems, as well as overall CPU decoding improvements on Windows. The changes should reduce CPU load when playing back HD videos, such as those encoded using the H.264 codec. However, the Mac OS X version, still currently only uses CPU decoding. Additional improvements include faster HD decoding, DSP decoding, better meta-data and album-art support, and several developer improvements, such as a new phonon-back end for Qt application and new C++ bindings.

VLC 1.1.0 on Mac OS X. Version 1.1. also allows users users to write their own plug-ins for VLC. Like Mozilla's Firefox web browser, the extensions will let users add even more functionality to VLC, such as an IMDb add-on to get plot or cast information about a movie. Other notable changes include DVB HD and PGS (Blu-ray) subtitles, improved Flac support, CDDB support on Windows and support for more audio and video codecs.

The developers also note that the SHOUTcast internet radio module has been removed from VLC "because AOL Corporation is hindering Open Source Software," noting that they "received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC."

More details about the release, including a full list of new features and changes, can be found in the release announcement, in the change log and on the 1.1.0 release page. VLC 1.1.0 is available to download either as source or as binaries for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). The next major release of VLC following 1.1.0 will be version 1.2.0.

See also:

• Google open source VP8 as part of the WebM Project, a report from The H.

(crve)