From the ‘Open Source Essentials’ files:
There are lots of different open source media player out there. For me, VLC has always stood alone at the top of pile. Eight years ago, I was part of the team that awarded VideoLAN (the people behind VLC) with the 2004 Open Source Award (then managed by CNET).
In all the years since, I’ve always been very satisfied using VLC as my everyday media player. Now with the new 2.0 release, those who are like me that love VLC will have even more reasons to love it – and for those that yet have to experience it – now is a great time.
VLC has long been the best (IMHO) open source media player because it supports more technologies (codecs, streams, filters, outputs, formats) and that’s a trend that is amplified in the 2.0 release.
VLC 2.0 has more performance and video capabilities than ever with multi-threaded decoding for H.264, MPEG-4/Xvid and WebM. Lots of new filters too including ebanding, grain, denoising and anti-flickering filters as well as a new deinterlacing filter. There are also new resamplers for higher quality audio.
Then of course there are all the bug fix improvements, which just make this program more stable and reliable across all the platforms it supports (currently Linux, Windows and Mac). According to the VLC devs, there were more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers for the VLC 2.0 release.
That’s impressive.
After 8+ years of VLC being my primary media player and the one that I’ve installed/recommended to everyone I know on every platform – I’m just so grateful that the awesome community of development and users continues to get better year after year.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.