Software Update: VLC Media Player 0.8.0 Test2

The developers behind the VideoLAN project are working on a new generation of its media player and have just released its second and hopefully final beta. VLC is an open source, cross platform media player that has ‘out of the box’ support for MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX and XviD video files. Also, different audio formats can be played, such as mp3 and Ogg Vorbis. The appearance of the program can be changed using skins. The list with changes since version 0.72 is too long to list here, so we’ll suffice with the highlights of the upcoming 0.80 release:

The VideoLAN team is happy to announce the second, and hopefully last beta version of the upcoming VLC 0.8.0. This is a major update. Main features include:

• Completely rewritten input system (better, faster, improved seeking, more extensible – eg. allows multi-input support).
• Rewrite of the transcoding layer. (everything VLC plays can now be transcoded).
• New plugins cache system to dramatically speed up launch time.
• Improvements to the subtitles/OSD subsystem.
• Vastly improved DVD support.
• DirectX Media Object decoder/encoder (Win32 only – supports WMV3).
• Cross-platform OpenGL video output with special effects
• New screen capture input plugin (to stream your desktop).
• Windows Media Server RTSP support.
• Multipart JPEG demuxing/muxing. (for video streaming to a Mozilla Web Browser)
• DVB subtitles decoding/encoding.
• Audio equalizer.
• New streaming wizard and other interface improvements (many more controls in extended GUI in wxwindows)