VLC Media Player 1.0.0 RC2 / 0.9.9a

VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
VLC can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Main features:
- It is a free cross-platform media player.
- It supports a large number of multimedia formats, without the need for additional codecs.
- It can also be used as a streaming server, with extended features (video on demand, on the fly transcoding, ...).

System requirements:
-
- G4 processor/Intel for smooth MPEG-2 decoding.

Enhancements
Important notes:
- Alsa and OSS audio capture has been removed from the v4l and v4l2 accesses.
- Support for Mac OS X 10.4.x was dropped due to its technical limitations.
Playback:
- Instantaneous pausing.
- Frame-by-Frame playback.
- Finer speed control.
- On-the-fly recording for all medias.
- Timeshift for most medias.
- RTSP trickplay 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.
- 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.
- 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 - the development form of zip://file.zip|file.avi is not supported anymore).
- 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
Playlist:
- Export the playlist in HTML.
- Lua script for BBC radio playback.
- Better metadata handling and reading.
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 memleak. Mosaics are now usable again.
Maemo Port - New Maemo port with:
- An interface based on Hildon framework.
- Scaler based on the swscale_nokia770 library.
Mac OS X Port:
- Speed improvements by using llvm-gcc.
- New Document icons by Dominic Spitaler.
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.
Miscellanous:
- Invmem, a fake codec to display images from external applications.