14 DAY TRIAL // The people at VideoLAN Project have updated the popular cross-platform multimedia player for Mac, PC and Linux, VLC Media Player, also posting a few important notes. Particularly, the team stresses that Alsa and OSS audio capture has been removed from the v4l and v4l2 accesses while support for Mac OS X 10.4.x has been dropped “due to its technical limitations.”
Noting that the comments are the best place to mourn the “death” of VLC for Tiger starting with version 1.0.0 RC2, let's skim through the main changes delivered by the newest update.
Video Output is experiencing major improvements starting with the removal of effects (cube, torus, etc.) from OpenGL video output, and a rewritten image video output into a video-filter named 'scene'. Video is now able to stay in original size and to zoom in fullscreen (hotkey 'o') while keeping black borders, whereas the old image video output has been removed. Support for scaling and converting video chromas with FFMpeg imgresample was withdrawn due to bugs, says the development team, who urges users to use the newer FFMPEG swscale instead.
As far as Playback is concerned, here's the new set of features:
- Instantaneous pausing. - Frame-by-Frame playback. - Finer speed control. - On-the-fly recording for all medias. - Timeshift for most medias. - RTSP trickplay support. - Subtitles core improvements and fixes.
New Decoders have been added as well, including AES3 (SMPTE 302M) decoder; Dolby Digital Plus - E-AC-3 (A/52b) decoder; True HD/MLP decoder and parser; Blu-Ray Linear PCM decoder and QCELP (Qualcomm PureVoice) decoder. Other improvements in this area are listed as such:
- Improved Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 decoder. - New WMA v1/2 fixed point integer decoder. - Close Caption under SCTE-20 standard are now correctly decoded. - Improvement of WavPack decoder to support all integer modes and float mode. - Corrections on 5.1 and 7.1 channel decoding and ordering.
Mac OS X-specific changes include speed improvements by using llvm-gcc and new Document icons by Dominic Spitaler. Readers can download the latest version of VLC Media Player (including the latest supported version for OS X 10.4 Tiger) using the link below.