VLC media player 1.1.0 released

A major new engine has been released for the free and multiplatform VLC media player. It is has now also been adapted for High Definition.

The VideoLAN project has announced that the final version of VLC media player 1.1.0 has been made available. This major release has been presented as being HD ready with hardware acceleration for H.264, as well as VC-1 and MPEG-2 under Windows Vista, Windows 7 and GNU/Linux.

For Windows, VideoLAN recommends that for the moment, it is "unfortunately" only available for NVIDIA GPU’s, "as ATI will need to correct their drivers and allow VLC developers access to Intel’s hardware supporting GPU decoding".

Still looking at HD, VLC media player 1.1.0 brings with it improvements for MKV HD support, new codec’s like Blu-ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless and the VP8 video codec. Support for the free WebM format for streaming video over the web is also present, WebM being the container for Matroska which brings together VP8 video streams with Ogg Vorbis audio.

Among the other formats added to VLC media player’s list, we find MPEG-4 ALS, Vorbis 6.1/7.1, FLAC 6.1/7.1 and Windows Media Speech (Voice) for audio.

You can look at all of the new features in VLC media player 1.1.0 by reading the version notes. The beginning is particularly interesting where it mentions extensions. By default, one extension allows you to get information from the IMDB movie database.

This release of VLC media player 1.1.0 has had some issues through, leading to the SHOUTcast function being removed. A conflict with AOL has lead to the integration of the web radio discovery service being removed due to the license not being compatible with the free program.

Download VLC media player 1.1.0