The people behind the VideoLAN Project have released a stable and much improved version of their VLC Media Player for Mac OS X, adding a number of new features, codecs and the usual laundry of bug fixes that any piece of software needs every now and then. The program is free to download and install on any Macintosh computer running Mac OS X Leopard.

VLC Media Player is one of the most popular multimedia players for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc.) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. The program can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network and doesn’t require external codecs or additional software to operate.

According to the folks at the VideoLAN Project, VLC Media Player 1.0.0 for Mac OS X introduces many new features, new formats and new codecs to the VLC multimedia framework. Additionally, the release notes say, version 1.0.0 fixes “a very high number of bugs” discovered in earlier versions of the software, particularly in the 0.9.x or 0.8.6 versions.

Last month, the developers of VLC Media Player announced a new release candidate for the popular cross-platform multimedia player, posting a few important notes. At the time, the team stressed that Alsa and OSS audio capture had been removed from the v4l and v4l2 accesses, while support for Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger) had been dropped “due to its technical limitations.” Unfortunately for Tiger users, today’s release is no different, VLC 1.0.0 being the final, polished-up version of the aforementioned VLC release candidate issued in June. The main features of the current version of VLC now include:

- 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, etc.);
- New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, etc.) and major improvements in many formats;
- New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder;
- Video scaling in fullscreen.

To download your own copy of the VLC Media Player, use the link below. Tiger users can still download their own supported version from the same page.

Download VLC Media Player (Free)