VLC Media Player reaches 2.0

VLC reaches 2.0

VLC media player is the most successful free open source multimedia player out there with over 500 million downloads according to the developers. In particular, VLC media player is a great alternative to Windows Media Player, and RealPlayer. It's lightweight, fast, easy to use and most importantly, plays almost anything.

After 485 million downloads of VLC 1.1.x versions, VideoLAN and the VLC development team present VLC 2.0.0 "Twoflower", a major new release.

• With faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs, 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC.
• Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos.
• It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental).
• Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use.
• Twoflower fixes several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers

More info on the release notes.

VLC Media Player is simply the best application multimedia application for Windows and Mac. It plays just about anything with the minimum of fuss - what more could you need?

Pros

• Supports a wide range of formats
• Good hotkey support
• Easy to use
• Very flexible and lightweight
• Integration with web channel streaming services
• Improved interface in version 2
• More format support in version 2
• Plays BluRay and HD

Cons

• User interface is quite basic
• User interface slicker in Mac version

 Download: Windows  (21 MB)
                 Mac OS X 10.6+ (25.4 MB)