VideoLAN releases VLC 1.0.0: Your media will never be the same
VideoLAN VLC's logo
VideoLAN's VLC media player, arguably the world's best media player, hit version 0.9.9 in early April. Three months and more than 78 million downloads later, VideoLAN has announced VLC 1.0.0, or "Goldeneye."
Your media will never be the same.
In fact, with VideoLAN's VLC media player for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it doesn't have to be. One of the amazing things about VLC is that it can play anything that you've ever even thought about playing. That random media format that one site in Ecuador requires--VLC likely plays it, while Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. likely will not.
This is, in part, a natural result of VLC's open-source heritage. Licensed under the GNU General Public License, VLC attracts a diverse array of developers with disparate media interests. Those interests translate into a media player that really can play every obscure media format I've ever thrown at it. (And in my hunger for Arsenal videos, I've found many different video formats that Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. didn't know what to do with.)
Here are a few of the features now available in VLC 1.0.0:
- Live recording
- Instant pausing and frame-by-frame support
- Finer speed controls
- New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, ...)
- New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, ...) and major improvements in many formats
- New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
- Video scaling in full screen
- RTSP Trickplay support
- Zipped file playback
- Customizable toolbars
- Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
- Better integration in Gtk environments
- MTP devices on Linux
- AirTunes streaming
I regularly use VLC to transcode media files, including files I originally streamed from the Web:
VLC can transcode virtually any media file.
(Credit: Matt Asay)If you don't have VLC, I encourage you to download it and give it a try. It really is an amazing media player, one that has far more tricks up its sleeve than the proprietary media player that came with your computer.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
-jason
I'll happily put in my vote that, hell yes, VLC works beautifully!
I didnt know about this media player. thanks.
"Subtitle Rendering is awful". Really? Because prior to the feature that broke their subtitle stream functionality it was quite readable, and supported external subtitle files far more reliably than other video players I've used. Did the text run off the screen? Was there specific coloration problems that made it difficult to read, are you perhaps referring to anti-aliasing issues. Any of of these bugs/lacking features could easily have been implemented since you used it last.
"General Interface is the opposite of 'user friendly'" As you so aptly say, "whatever that is". I happened to love the old VLC interface. I liked being able to right click and have everything at my disposal from fullscreen mode. It allowed for much more rapid shifting of deinterlacing modes/subtitle tracks/audio tracks than on any other video player I have ever used. Many of those changes would have required me delving into properties panes in other programs.
Remember that this is the 1.0 release. So everything before this was an in development program. Which means playing with layout and design. So complaining about features they hadn't included, or perfected rings fairly hollow when the developers weren't even pretending they were done with the program. If there are major bugs in the program now that the developers have graced it with a 1.0 moniker you can complain, it does carry a higher standard. Complaints about whatever version you used in the past ring fairly petty and hollow.
The bit about Ogg video support being something "no one with sense uses" is a bit of FUD, and sounds like a troll from an H.264 partisan, since the big debate within the HTML5 community is whether to standardize on Theora (which is entirely free, both as in beer and as in speech) or on H.264 (which is severely patent encumbered) for video on the web. Not that this would eliminate the use or support of other formats, but it would provide a baseline.
There's a good comparison of various video codecs for their bandwidth consumption, which is usually what people claim is a problem with Ogg Theora; it isn't, but that's the claim that some partisans make. Check the comparison out here and see for yourself: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
Seriously, why are there bulky nonsense out there like real player, windows media player and quicktime when there are better alternatives like vlc?
What is VLC stealing exactly?
Where the violation becomes an issue is for the technology companies that own the codec technologies. I guarantee movie makers don't care about that technology. They perhaps care about DRM, but that brings us back to the arguments in paragraph 1.
Also, violating copyright law does not destroy the system. It doesn't even come close to attempting to destroy the system. If the owners of the patented technology that is packaged with VLC chose to litigate they could. For some reason they haven't. I have always found that perplexing, but the powers that be have their reasons. The fact that they have not litigated does mean that the existence of VLC doesn't pose the level of threat you claim here. I guarantee if VLC were making a stab at DESTROYING THE COPYRIGHT SYSTEM that they base their business models on, they'd have been in court a long LO. . . oh sorry I forgot that whole all caps netiquette thing. Please forgive my transgressions a couple lines up. Anyway, VLC would have already been sued. Thinking before you post inflammatory comments like this might just be a good thing.
VLC is most certainly not paying for each of these licenses as that would be cuh-razy prices for each of the copies of thier software folks have downloaded.
My understanding has always been that players like VLC and codec packs like K-Lite are not on the up-and-up.
http://www.videolan.org/doc/faq/en/index.html#id447979
For me, version 1.0 (on Xubuntu) is the best version yet. It is as essential as Firefox and OpenOffice. I even use it to play mp3s and oggs.
- by Ted Miller July 7, 2009 12:12 PM PDT
- As far as I know, there isn't a media player out there that can beat it! No cumbersome and confusing codec packs to worry about. No hoping that video will work, it just will! Now thats a way a program should work! Now if only everyone else could follow their example. Microsoft with all their billions could not even get near the success that these people got to. I am sure they will steal it and rape it to oblivion like they do with everything else.; It really interesting that Homeland Security doesn't take Microsft down for all their terriost activities that they have been porforming against us all these years. Now we are going to get the Windows 7 Bomb. Um lets also not forget the their greatest terriost threat in the form of a Browser Operating System where Um... They have full control over.... YOU!
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