VLC media player 0.9.9 released

[kooldj]

VLC media player 0.9.9
The VideoLAN team is very pleased to announce the release of VLC media player 0.9.9.

This is a bugfix release on the 0.9 branch of VLC. Notables bugfixes are:

* fullscreen behaviour on Windows with multiple screens,
* workaround bug with libxml2 >=2.7.3,
* video performance on Intel-based Macs,
* various decoders updates on Windows.

An experimental native decoder for Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 using FFmpeg has been added and many fixes happened in our Real Media demuxer.
This should improve Real Media Files support on all platforms.

Download: VLC media player - Overview


Overview of VLC media player

VLC media player is an open source, free software media player written by the VideoLAN project.

VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats. VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but that meaning is now deprecated.[3][4] It is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, Syllable, BSD, GNU,Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS, Solaris and Zaurus, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads for version 0.8.6.[5]

VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries; on the Windows platform, this greatly reduces the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins. Many of VLC's codecs are provided by the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses mainly its own muxer and demuxers. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library.


Notable Features of VLC Media Player:

* VLC is popular for its ability to play the video content of incomplete, unfinished, or damaged video downloads before the files have been fully downloaded. (For example, files still downloading via BitTorrent, eMule, or Gnutella). It also plays m2t MPEG Transport Streams (.TS) files while they are still being digitized from an HDV camera via a FireWire cable, making it possible to monitor the video as it is being played. This is because it is a packet-based player.
* The player also has the ability to use libcdio to access .iso files so that the user can play files on a disk image, even if the user's operating system does not have the capability of working directly with .iso images.
* VLC supports all codecs and all file formats supported by FFmpeg. This means that DVD Video and MPEG-4 playback as well as support for Ogg and Matroska (MKV) file formats work "out of the box". However, this feature is not unique to VLC, as any player using the FFmpeg libraries, including MPlayer and xine-lib-based players, can play those formats without need for external codecs. VLC also supports codecs that are not included in FFmpeg.
* VLC is one of the freeware and open source DVD players that ignores DVD region coding, making it a region free player, even on locked RPC-2 firmware.
* VLC media player has some filters that can distort, rotate, split, deinterlace, mirror videos, create display walls, or add a logo overlay. It can also produce video output as ASCII art.
* VLC media player can play high definition recordings of D-VHS tapes duplicated to a computer using CapDVHS.exe. This offers another way to archive all D-VHS tapes with the DRM copy freely tag.
* Using a FireWire connection from cable boxes to computers, VLC can stream live, unencrypted content to a monitor or HDTV.
* VLC media player can display the playing video as the desktop wallpaper, like Windows DreamScene, but this feature is not currently available on Linux.
* VLC media player can do screencasts and record the desktop.
* On Microsoft Windows, VLC also supports the Direct Media Object (DMO) framework and can therefore make use of some third-party DLLs.
* VLC can be installed and run directly from a flash or other external drive.
* VLC can be extended through scripting. It uses the Lua scripting language.

Format support:

Readable formats

VLC can read several formats, depending on the operating system VLC is running on.[16]

Input
UDP/RTP unicast or multicast, HTTP, FTP, MMS, RTSP, RTMP, DVDs, VCD, SVCD, CD Audio, DVB, Video acquisition (via V4l and DirectShow), RSS/Atom Feeds, and from files stored on your computer.
Container formats
3GP,[17] ASF, AVI, FLV, MKV, Musical Instrument Digital Interface (.mid/.midi),[18] QuickTime, MP4, Ogg, OGM, WAV, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), AIFF, Raw audio, Raw DV, MXF, VOB.
Video formats
Cinepak, Dirac, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3,[19] MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo[20], Sorenson (thus enabling direct playback of the modified Sorenson H.263 encoded videos downloaded from YouTube), Theora, VC-1,[21] VP5,[21] VP6,[21] WMV.
Subtitles
DVD, SVCD, DVB, OGM, SubStation Alpha, SubRip, Advanced SubStation Alpha, MPEG-4 Timed Text, Text file, Vobsub, MPL2,[22] Teletext.[22]
Audio formats
AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR,[17] DTS, DV Audio, XM, FLAC, MACE, MP3, PLS (file format), QDM2/QDMC, RealAudio,[23] Speex, Screamtracker 3/S3M, TTA, Vorbis, WavPack,[24] WMA.

Output formats for streaming/encoding

VLC can transcode into several formats depending on the operating system.

Container formats
ASF, AVI, FLV,[22] Fraps,[22] MP4, Ogg, Wav, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), MPJPEG, FLAC, MOV
Video formats
H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, VP5,[21] VP6,[21] Theora, DV
Audio formats
AAC, AC3, DV Audio, FLAC, MP3,[25] Speex, Vorbis
Streaming protocols
UDP, HTTP, RTP, RTSP, MMS, File