Software Update: VLC Media Player 1.0 RC1

The developers of VideoLAN have released the first release candidate of version 1.0 of VLC Media Player. VLC Media Player is an open source and cross platform media player that can play various audio, video and streaming formats without having to install the appropriate codec. The program is actively being developed for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X; older versions are also available for BeOS, BSD, Linux, Morphos, Solaris and Windows CE. Downloads are in this ftp folder to find. Below is the complete list of changes since version 0.9.9:

Important notes:

• Alsa and OSS audio capture has been removed from the v4l and v4l2 accesses. See ‘Access:’ for more info.

Playback:

• Instantaneous pausing
• Frame-by-Frame playback
• Finer speed control
• On-the-fly recording for all medias
• Timeshift for most medias
• RTSP trick play support
• Subtitles core improvements and fixes

decoders:

• New AES3 (SMPTE 302M) decoder
• New Dolby Digital Plus – E-AC-3 (A/52b) decoder
• New True HD/MLP decoder and parser
• New Blu-Ray Linear PCM decoder
• New QCELP (Qualcomm PureVoice) decoder
• Improved Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 decoder
• New WMA v1/2 fixed point integer decoder
• Close Caption under SCTE-20 standard are now correctly decoded
• Improvement of WavPack decoder to support all integer modes and float mode
• Corrections on 5.1 and 7.1 channel decoding and ordering

Demuxers:

• Support for Dirac, MLP and RealVideo in Matroska files
• Major improvements in RealMedia files opening (.rm and .rmvb)
• Improvements of the TS demuxer for M2TS files from Blu-Ray and AVCHD
• Metadata for mod files are supported
• GSM codecs in Wav files are supported
• New raw audio demuxer supporting raw PCM streams
• New dirac demuxer for raw dirac streams

encoders:

• Dirac encoding using libdirac (supported in Ogg and in TS)
• Shine mp3 fixed point encoder

Access:

• RTSP authentication with Darwin Streaming Server
• On-the-fly gzip and bzip2 file decompression (except on Windows)
• Playback for video in uncompressed multi-RAR archives
• DVB-S and ATSC cards support on Windows
• New OSS and Alsa accesses. The v4l2 and v4l modules no longer support OSS or Alsa audio input. Use –input-slave alsa:// or oss:// if needed.
• DVB scanning on Linux
• EXPERIMENTAL Blu-Ray Disc and AVCHD Folders support
• On-the-fly zip file decompression and browsing (MRL of the form zip://file.zip|file.avi to specify the file)
• Opening of any file descriptor using ‘fd://’
• MTP device access on Unix
• CD-Text support on the cdda module (CD-Audio)
• :start-time and :stop-time can handle sub-second values

Inputs:

• Mouse cursor support in x11 and win32 screen modules
• Screen module now features partial screen capture and mouse following on Windows.

playlist:

• Export the playlist in HTML
• Lua script for BBC radio playback
• Better metadata handling and reading

Linux/Windows interface:

• Global Hotkeys on Windows and Linux
• Various fixes for skins2 interface
• Recently played items list
• Interface toolbar customizations
• Various Improvements on the Qt interface:
  • More menu actions
  • Finer speed slider
  • Improvements on many dialogs
  • New dialog for plugins listing
  • Fixed-size mode for videos
  • Better teletext, trickplay and encrypted streams control
• Better integration in GTK environments

Mac OS X Interface:

• Controllable by the Media Keys on modern Apple keyboards (brushed Aluminium)
• Reveal-in-Finder functionality for locally stored items.
• Easy addition of Subtitles through the Video menu
• Additional usability improvements

Stream output:

• Restored the old mpeg2 transrating module.
• Multiple bridge-in instances are now possible.
• bridge-in can be used to configure a placeholder stream.
• Remote Audio Output Protocol (AirTunes) module.
• Fixed mosaic mem leak. Mosaics are now usable again.

Maemo Port:

• New Maemo port with:
  • an interface based on Hildon framework.
  • scaler based on the swscale_nokia770 library.

Windows CE Port:

• EXPERIMENTAL work for the winCE port has been done.

Mac OS X Port:

• Support for Mac OS X 10.4.x was dropped due to its technical limitations
• Speed ​​improvements by using llvm-gcc

audio output:

• Removed obsolete Esound and aRts plugins
• Surround support for PulseAudio

Video output:

• Effects (cube, torus, etc.) removed from OpenGL video output
• Video is able to stay in original size and to zoom in fullscreen (hotkey ‘o’) while keeping black borders
• Image video output has been rewritten into a video filter named ‘scene’. The old image video output has been removed.
• Support for scaling and converting video chromas with FFMPEG imgresample was withdrawn due to bugs. Please use the newer FFMPEG swscale instead.

miscellaneous:

• Invmem, a fake codec to display images from external applications