Mac release brings new hardware support, including for “so-called Retina displays”

Jun 29, 2012 11:31 GMT  ·  By

The people behind the VideoLAN project have announced a major new release of VLC Media Player for all platforms, including a notable Mac version packing a ton of fixes, tweaks, and enhancements.

Video output is greatly enhanced in this new VLC Mac release, with the VideoLAN team including various fixes, notably for crop, zoom, osd and menu support.

The team further carried out some miscellaneous fixes in the OpenGL module on all platforms, and video output on PowerPC-based Macs equipped with an ATI Radeon 7500 has been fixed. The same goes for Macs equipped with an ATI Radeon 9200 or a NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 Ultra card.

Further fixes have been carried out on video output of 10bit encoded contents on Intel-based Macs equipped with an Intel GMA 950 chipset running OS X 10.6 or later.

And there’s now support for the HiDPI mode “used on recent Apple products with so-called Retina Displays,” according to the development team.

Unless we’re missing something here, VideoLAN doesn’t seem to be very fond of the ultra-crisp screen on Apple’s new MacBook Pro with Retina display.

Mac users can now use media keys on keyboards made by other manufacturers than Apple, and there’s now support for the Apple Remote to set the Mac to sleep using a longer press on the Play/Pause button.

The option to hide the window decoration during video playback has been re-included, and the player now keeps the aspect ratio when resizing the window.

Some controls have been added to manipulate the Subtitles Duration to the Track, and opening DVDs or BDs by drag & drop should be more reliable now.

The Growl (notification system) plugin has been updated to work with Growl 1.3, and the chosen audio output device is retained throughout multiple sessions, just to name a couple more Mac-specific changes.

Lots more tweaks and fixes can be found in the full changelog here. Download VLC Player for Mac via the link below.

Download VLC Media Player for Mac OS X (Free)