VLC media player reaches version 1.0.0

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 08 July 2009 03:55

Business IT - Open Source

The 'Goldeneye' release of VLC is a milestone for the open-source media player application: it's finally reached version 1.0.0.

Google Apps isn't the only piece of software to finally lose a long-standing beta label. The well-regarded open-source VLC media player has finally reached version 1.0.0 - over eight years after its original release.

There are several reasons for VLC's popularity, but perhaps most importantly it is capable of playing a wide variety of media types - including DVDs.

This side of the program has been further bolstered in version 1.0.0. There are new decoders for AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, True HD/MLP, Blu-Ray Linear PCM (though Blu-ray disc support is only experimental), QCELP, and WMA v1/2.

Improvements have been made to other decoders, and the demuxers have been improved and extended.

The playback controls have received attention, and VLC now provides instantaneous pausing, frame-by-frame playback, and finer speed control. The Mac OS X version supports the media keys on Apple's aluminium keyboards.

Talking of Apple, VLC now supports AirTunes audio output.

VLC 1.0.0 is available as a compiled program for various Linux distributions, Windows (2000 or later), and Mac OS X (10.5 or later). Mac users still running 10.4 will have to make do with version 0.9.9a. This change is attributed to "technical limitations" in Tiger.