VideoLan Project Ships VLC 1.0.0!

July 08, 2009

On Monday, the VideoLan Project, developers of the popular streaming media software player VLC  shipped a major new release, version 1.0.0.  VLC is well known in the open source community.  What started as a student project has grown into one of the better known and successful open source projects.  VLC supports many different video formats and streaming protocols and does so on many platforms including Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.  According to the VideoLan Project website, the key features of VLC 1.0.0 are:

• Free, Open Source and Cross-Platform
• Independent of systems codecs to support most video types
• 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 fullscreen
• 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
• New skin for the skins2 interface

They say a picture is worth a  thousand words so here is a diagram that shows the various ways that VLC (and an associated video server called VLS) can be used for video streaming:

VideoLan Streaming diagram

 For more details including the free download link head over to the VideoLan Group