VLC Media Player Out In Much-Improved New Version

by Sam Dean - Jun. 22, 2010Comments (0)

The good news today on the application front is that the VideoLAN Project has released version 1.1 of the open source VLC Media Player. The new version supports GPU and DSP decoding on a number of platforms, many more video and audio codes, new extensions and has many interface improvements. If you, like me, favor VLC Media Player over all competitors, definitely download the new version.

The new version of VLC Media Player is out for the Mac, Windows and Linux. I especially like it on the Mac. In addition to its capabilities for playback, you can use VLC Media Player to transcode videos and songs between formats. Many of its new features extend it out toward newer and more capable types of hardware and more cutting-edge codecs.

The new version of VLC does GPU decoding on Windows Vista and 7, using DxVA2 for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2, and does GPU decoding on GNU/Linux, using VAAPI for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2. Among new types of Codec support, there is support for Blu-Ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless and VP8.

One other really great thing about VLC Media Player--which is a result of its open source status--is that there are a lot of external resources and extensions for it. We covered a number of them here, and they're worth looking into. Definitely download the new version of one of the best open source media players.