The Techiebyte: VLC 2.0 'Twoflower' Released

VideoLAN organisation has released the latest version of VLC media player, VLC 2.0. Apart from UI changes, the new version of the media player brings fixes for several hundred bugs, and has many other new features, including improved decoding support with a new rendering pipeline for different hardware, such as multi-core processors, mobile chipsets, and dedicated GPUs.

VLC 2.0, known as Twoflower, also brings support for a wide range of file formats, including experimental Blu-ray disc playback (full support expected soon). Other new features include a completely re-worked interfaces for the Mac and web platforms, Mac extensions support, improved Mac OS X 10.7 Lion integration, higher quality subtitles, new video filters, new resamplers for higher quality audio, new dynamic range compressor and karaoke filters, faster audio processing, as well as new video and audio outputs for Windows 7, Android, iOS and OS/2.

Professional users will be happy to know VLS 2.0 will feature support for ProRes 422 and 4444, AVC/Intra, Jpeg-2000 and DNxHD/VC-3 in 10bits, EBU subtitles (stl) and EIA-608, SDI and HD-SDI cards for Linux input, as well as faster Dirac/VC-2 encoders.

Developer features include updated LGPLv2.1+ for libVLC, libVLCcore and libcompat, new JSON requests on the web interface to control running VLC instances, and implementation of the MPRIS2 interface to control media players. VLC's web plugins have also been rewritten for better integration and stability in all browsers.

For a full list of changes, visit VLC 2.0's feature page, which also features the download links for Linux, Mac, and Windows.