If you are one who watches movies in a number of different formats, you are probably familiar with VLC Media Player. VLC is one of the most popular media players used due to its ability to play a wide array of video formats. For the many users of VLC media player, today marks a milestone in VLC improvements/advancements.
In a recent news release, VLC announced its release of VLC Media Player 2.2.0 and mobile port releases. This is the first time VLC has released a coordinated update for desktop, iOS, Android, and Windows phone. According to the news release:
Those releases are the result of more than one year of volunteer work, add numerous new features, fix more than one thousand bugs and improves the scope of the formats supported.
A new version number is great, but what does the release actually entail? Check out the details below (straight from VLC’s release notes):
- Fight the popular vertical video syndrome! VLC automatically detects rotated videos and rotates them using hardware acceleration (on compatible platforms)!
- This is supported for MP4/MOV, MKV and raw H264.
- Resume playback where you left off. Supported on all the mobile versions of VLC for quite some time, it is now available on the desktop.
- Vastly improved support for UltraHD video codecs like VP9 and H265, including encoding.
- New hardware acceleration mechanism, GPU 0-copy decoding, faster and implementations for Linux, Android, and Raspberry Pi. (Other OSes will have it in 3.0.0)
- Extensions: supported since a long time, we now feature an in-app downloader for the desktop, like Firefox
- Subtitles downloading extension
- Compatibility with a very large number of unusual codecs
- Vastly improved compatibility for problematic files in Ogg, MP4, and WMV.
- Support for Digital Cinema Package to play native movie theater formats.
- Experimental support of Interactive Menus of BluRays: BD-J
- On OS X, we’ve updated the interface for Yosemite compatibility.
- On Android, we rewrote most of the UI to match Google Material Design.
- This is the first public beta releases for Windows Phone, Windows RT and Android TV.
- It is also the first non-beta release on Android.
As you can see, there have been a ton of improvements to VLC with this release. However, don’t expect VLC to be bug free. As with any new software release, there will likely be a number of issues that will be discovered, but don’t let that discourage you. If you see a bug, let VLC know about it, as they are continually looking to improve their service. If you haven’t already, you can download VLC Media Player here.
As mentioned above, VLC is one of the most popular media players, and the release of 2.2.0 will only increase the popularity of VLC Media Player. With that said, what are your thoughts? Are you excited to start using the new and improved VLC media player? If so, what are you most excited for? Let us know in the comment section below.