A Modest Construct

Very likely the last incremental release before the all-important v0.9.0, the VideoLan project has released v0.8.6 of its cross-platform media player, VLC. This is one of those products that highlights what’s good about the open-source world: a really high-quality, useful piece of software that’s available for a buttload of platforms. I personally think VLC is leagues ahead of MPlayer, even though the latter seems to get all the multimedia attention.

Changes between 0.8.5 and 0.8.6
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• Playlist:
  • Shoutcast TV listings support
• Input:
  • Support for RTSP authentication
  • Support for adding subtitles on the fly
  • Fixed MPEG-PS duration calculation
  • ATSC support for DVB input
  • Partial reading support for DVR-ms recordings
  • Partial reading support for MXF and GXF fileformat
  • Improved support for Flash Video files
• Decoders:
  • Native WMV9/VC-1 support
  • WMA Speech support (through binary codecs)
  • VP5/VP6 - Flash Video support
  • The True Audio Lossless codec support
  • WavPack support
  • Improved H.264 support (interlaced, speed improvements etc)
  • Fixed a problem with MPEG2 field pictures
  • Fixed swapped colors on DVB subtitles
• Video output:
  • Additional OpenGL effects (cylinder, torus, sphere, …)
  • Experimental Direct3D 9 video output (win32). Best served on Vista :)
  • Improved libcaca support
• Interfaces:
  • All
    • New hotkeys for crop and zoom
    • Support for snapshots from the HTTP interface
  • * Windows
    • Systray support in skins
  • * OS X
    • Support for Apple Remote control
    • Fullscreen controller panel (artwork by Simon Damkjær Andersen)
    • New playmode buttons (artwork by Simon Damkjær Andersen)
    • right/ctrl-click menu in video outputs
    • Main Menu uses autohide when playing videos in fullscreen mode
  • * Linux
    • Notifications using notification-daemon
• Windows port:
  • Support for Unicode filenames (Windows NT and above)
  • Windows 9x/ME users:
    • Please note that these versions of Windows are not officially supported
    • Unicode support for Windows 9x/ME applications is available through the Microsoft Layer for Unicode available from [here]. Download the MSLU package (unicows) and extract the content into the folder C:\Windows\System
  • Fixed IPv6 support on the client side
  • Fixed disable screensaver (Direct3D and DirectX video output)
• Localization:
  • Add Czech
  • Add Slovak
  • Add Malay
  • Add Slovenian
• Developers:
  • Updates to the libvlc API
  • Fixes for the mozilla and activeX plugins

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