VLC 2.0 Has Been Released, Download Links Inside

We have followed the latest VLC development ever since Videolan pushed the first build of the media player’s new version to the public ftp server. It did not take long after that initial release before the first release candidate build was made available.
The developers today have released the final version of the media player. Interested users can download it directly from the official website where it is available for Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh and Linux operating systems. The 64-bit version of Windows has not been posted yet on the VLC 2.0 download page. Only a 64-bit Mac OS X version has been posted yet. It is not clear if the developers have postponed the released of the 64-bit Windows version, or if they plan to release the first official 64-bit release for the operating system in one of the next releases instead.
The release notes lists all the important changes of VLC 2.0 Twoflower sorted into groups such as video, audio, formats or professional users.
The developers have added experimental Blu-Ray disc support to VLC 2.0. It is experimental because of its limitations. This first version does not support menus yet, and does not ship with AACS and BD+ DRM libraries that are needed to play back copy protected Blu-Ray discs.

Other changes include a rewritten video output core and modules, new video outputs for Windows 7, Android and iOS, and multi-threaded decoding for H.264, MPEG-4 and WebM. The developers have added support for several professional codecs and formats, including HD and 10bits codecs as well as SDI and HD-SDI card support for input on Linux.
Mac users benefit from extensions support and OS X Lion integration, continued support for OS X 10.5 and Power PC users, and support for all QTKit devices.
VLC 2.0 improves the decoding performance on multi-core processor systems, systems that support gpu hardware decoding and mobile hardware the player runs on. A click on Tools > Preferences > Input & Codecs > Use GPU accelerated decoding reveals whether gpu hardware acceleration is enabled in the media player. It is turned off by default.
Users who do not want VLC to remember which videos they played in the media player can disable the history feature in the Interface Settings under Save recently played items.
Have you worked with VLC 2.0 already? If so, what is your opinion of the new release? Oh, and if you prefer direct links to the downloads, use this link.

Get Ready For VLC Media Player 2.0

VLC is one of the most popular third party media players. If you check the download stats on portals such as Softpedia or Betanews, you will notice that it is always listed in one of the top spots. That’s not because of the player’s pretty name but the functionality it provides. VLC plays nearly every media format out of the box, without codec hunting and installation. There are other players, like the excellent SMplayer that offer that functionality as well, but none managed to reach the popularity of VLC.

The developers of VLC Media Player have just announced on their Twitter account that they will release the first release candidate of VLC 2.0 at the end of the week. The latest release version right now is VLC 1.1.11 which is available for Windows, Mac OS X, popular Linux distributions and even other operating systems such as Android or OS/2 (anyone still using that?).

Windows 64-bit version of VLC Media Player running the Spin Demo

Once a suitable release candidate has been found, VLC Media Player 2.0 will be released for all operating systems. Existing VLC users likely want to know what they can look forward to in version 2 of the player. Here is a list of important changes taken directly from the latest nightly build of VLC 2.0.

• Major Video Core and Outputs rework and rewrite: Subtitles, subpictures and OSD can now be sized and blent inside video outputs x11 (Unix), OpenGL (Unix) and Direct3D (Windows) are such video outputs.
• Almost every video filter can now be transcoded
• Port to Android, iOS, OS/2 and Win64
• Multiple files are now supported inside RAR files
• Experimental Blu-Ray Discs support using libbluray
• You can now use ffmpeg-mt in conjunction with vlc, to split decoding load on multiple cores. H.264, VP3, VP8, JPEG-2000, Mpeg-4 ASP/DivX and RV3/RV4
  are notably concerned.
• C64 SID file playback support of using sidplay2
• Support for WMV Images, aka WMVP and WVP2, as used by Photo Story
• New video output based on Direct2D for Windows 7 and Vista (with Platform Update), New video output for iOS platform

Probably the biggest improvements are the 64-bit version for Windows, the port to mobile operating systems and Blu-Ray playback support.

You can get a taste of things to come by downloading the latest nightly build from the VLC build server. Remember that nighly versions are not necessarily stable, as they are development builds. (Thanks Mike)

While we are at it: Which media player are you currently using?