Developed by VideoLAN, VLC is one of the few media players,
which support a huge array of codecs, compression methods and file
formats, and is best known for the way it handles multimedia file
rendering. There’re surely sheer number of media players available
nowadays, but VLC is arguably the most powerful, open source media
player that comes with an extensive list of features and options. Last
month, VideoLAN announced that the next version of VLC (codenamed
Twoflower) would be released soon, and provided some nightly builds of
VLC 2.0 for testing purposes. If you’ve been eagerly waiting for VLC 2.0
final version, you will be glad to know that it has just been released.
In this post, we discuss some of the most significant improvements and
features of this major update.
VLC 2.0 brings a slew of enhancements for both novice and skilled users alike. Apart from numerous major video and audio
output improvements, it includes some changes for packagers, such as
default UTF-8 encoding (non-UTF-8 file support will not be available in
future versions), the plugins path can be overridden with VLC plugin
path environment, default tarballs will come compressed with XZ/LZMA,
and most importantly, all the web plugins are moved to
git://git.videolan.org/npapi-vlc.git.
It also includes a wide range of additional devices and file formats
support. You will be able to easily access and play media files
contained in RAR container. The support for Blu-Ray discs has also been included. You can now specify
Blu-Ray discs from
Open Disc
dialog, and tweak other Blu-ray playback settings. Moreover, the latest
version supports all QTKit-compatible video and input devices. It also
lets you capture partially hidden windows in the X11 screen input. The
HTTPS access is also improved, and Windows version will be able to
access media over HTTPS without facing any issues.
Major Interface Improvements And New Audio & Video Filters
Apart from under the hood changes and code improvements, the main
interface has also been revamped and deeply debugged to give best media
playback experience. If you use VLC as an audio player and often tweak
with equalizer settings, you will notice a newly added
Compressor tab alongside
Graphic Equalizer. It
lets you enable dynamic range compressor to change RMS/peak, Attack,
Release, Threshold, Ratio, Knee radius and Makeup gain values.
You will also notice changes in
Preamp, EQ sliders, and especially in
Video Effects and
Synchronization panels. The
Video Effects
console’s tabs and their options are re-adjusted in a compact window.
You no longer have to change the panel size or use the tabs navigation
buttons. Apart from this, it now includes numerous new video effects and
filters. For instance, the
Basic tab is renamed to
Essential, and now it has 2 extra effects including
Banding removal and
Film Grain. There is no
Transform control in Essential tab, but you can access it from
Geometry tab.
You will find
Color fun controls in
Colors tab. It also adds extra color controls including
Negate colors, Posterize and
Sepia. Since
Image modification tab has been removed, its controls are placed into other tabs. For example, you can now access
Gradient controls, which include Gradient mode and color & cartoon effects, from
Colors tab.
Alongside
Magnification/Zoom,
Rotate and Puzzle game, you will see
Transform and
Wall controls (from vout/Overlay tab) in
Geometry tab.
Another major change that you will notice is re-adjustment of
Logo controls. You can find all the options and controls which were accessible from
Logo tab, in
Overlay tab. It also adds a new feature namely
Add text
that allows you to overlay text on both local and streaming video. You
can also enable/disable this filter with a click, and set the text
position.
Similarly, you can access almost all the controls of
Image Modification from
Advanced tab. It includes controls like
Waves, Water effect, Motion detect, Psychedelic and
Motion blur from
Image Modification tab, and
Clone effect control from
Vout/Overlay tab. You will find 2 new controls namely
Anti-flickering and
Spatial Blur to control/reduce flickering on the video, and apply special blur effect, respectively.
The audio/video and video/subtitles synchronization
features have also been improved. If now offers a new subsdelay filter
that allows you to change subtitles delays by specified value. Unlike
previous versions, VLC 2.0 synchronization filters are more responsive,
and immediately apply custom subtitles playback settings.
Apart from supporting 3 playlist view modes, VLC 2.0 now adds
iTunes-like cover art playlist view. You can access the coverflow
playlist view by clicking the
change playlist view button, present adjacent to search bar.
If you switch to playlist view while watching a video, it will show a
video thumbnail preview in left side bar. Unlike previous versions,
which show only the sample VLC cover art, VLC 2.0 displays the
associated cover art, and if it doesn’t find one, it simply shows the
live thumbnail preview of the video. You can double-click it to watch
video in full-screen mode.
Talking of video window-related improvements, the full screen view
mode now shows the docked video controller. It becomes active whenever
you move mouse pointer to select the required option. A small button
besides volume control lets you dock/undock the full screen video
controller.
VLC 2.0 also makes it easy to choose and play other multimedia items in playlist
while watching the video in full screen. Now, you don’t have to switch
to compact mode to select audio/video file from playlist. You can access
playlist from right-click context menu
while watching video in full-screen. Just move to Playlist option, and
it will show all the items on the screen. Moreover, you can now easily
select subtitle file and access Tools menu from Subtitle and Tools options, respectively.
VLC 2.0 comes with a real-time search feature, which lets you easily find the options you want to tweak. The
Preferences includes a search bar at top-left corner, allowing you to quickly search any option from preferences’ categories.
The Mac OS X version also includes a great deal of new features and options. The
Main window and
Video window
is re-written from scratch. VLC 2.0 Mac version comes with both Mac OS X
Lion skin (grey color) and QTX style skin (black color); you can switch
between the default Interface styles from VLC—>Preferences.
Additionally, it includes
Compressor and
Spatializer
filters, track Synchronization panel, new video effects filters. VLC
2.0 supports Mac OS X Full-Screen mode, allowing you organize media
collection without any distractions.
As far as codecs support and improvements are concerned, VLC 2.0 will allow you to use
ffmpeg-mt
to balance the decoding load. This will significantly reduce the time
it requires to decode following formats: H.264, VP3, VP8, JPEG-2000,
Mpeg-4 ASP/DivX and RV3/RV4. Moreover, the MKV
file container playback improvements have also been incorporated. The
latest version brings update for both RealVideo 3.0 and RealVideo 4.0
file playback. For those who play around with subtitles, it now supports
decoding EBU subtitles files (.stl), and brings improvements for
EIA-608 closed captions. Other notable improvements include support for
WMV images (WMVP and WVP2), Lagarith Loseless video codec, ProRes 422 –
10 bits, DNxHD and JPEG-2000 – 10bits, and encoding of MPEG1/2 files via
MP2 fourcc codec.
VLC 2.0 comes with quite a long list of features, interface-related
improvements, code fixes, audio and video filters, demuxers, and
streaming abilities. We’ve tried to cover only the most salient features
and improvements. It must be noted that VLC 2.0 doesn’t include some
modules from previous versions. You can view complete list of both added
features and removed modules
here. VLC 2.0 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The 64-bit version for Windows is in works, and will be available soon.
