New features in VLC media player 1.0

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 3:14 pm by Elena Santos

Free, Mac, Review, Software, Video, Windows

It’s not officially published on their website yet, but it seems that VLC media player 1.0 RC is about to be released. At least that’s what we can infer from the fact that the news has been leaked across the Internet and the file is already available to download from FileHippo.

VLC Media Player is about to hit version 1.0

While this is not the official VLC Release Candidate – if you understand “official” as coming from the developer’s website – we just couldn’t resist the temptation to download it and take a look. VLC Player has always been one of our favorite pieces of software and we were eager to see all the new features.

VLC Media Player is about to hit version 1.0

At first sight, as you can see, VLC 1.0 hasn’t changed that much. The program still keeps its characteristic plain interface that makes it really simple to use. But going into detail you’ll notice a slight change in the toolbar layout, with “Playback” now next to “Media”, and an important reorganization in menu layouts, to access certain tools more easily and also include some of VLC’s new utilities.

VLC Media Player is about to hit version 1.0

Among these new features, you’ll find the following:

Instantaneous pausing
Frame by frame playback
Finer playback speed control
New and fixed audio and video decoders
On-the-fly recording for all media
Timeshift for most media
On the fly zip file decompression and browsing
Support for DVB-S and ATSC cards on Windows
Experimental Blu-Ray disc and AVCHD folder support
New Blu-Ray Linear PCM decoder
Customizable interface controls
Global Hotkeys on Windows and Linux
Controllable by multimedia keys on modern Apple keyboards (OS X only)
Several new and improved decoders, demuxers, encoders, and other codec-related goodies

Besides all these changes, VLC Media Player 1.0 RC still stands out for its main characteristic: the ability to play virtually any media file type you can drop onto it. In the end, this is probably why we love it so much.

Reader comments

yottabyte

Posted at 3:21 pm on May 13th

I’ve use this software for about two months, and I find it really interesting: relatively fast, does not need many resources, does not need external codecs…

Thanks for the article

Un saludo jaja

Bishop

Posted at 7:12 pm on May 15th

I’m using VLC version 0.9.9 and although it looks cleaner and nicer than earlier version, I do not know why the removed the slow motion controls from the player. For example, on this version, when you’re playing a movie, the only controls are <> next media file. Before there was a slow button and a FFW button right next to these two buttons I mentioned. For this reason alone, I use this old version on my home PC. While I’m at work, I use the new version as I don’t really need the slow motion features to listen to MP3’s.

Bishop

Posted at 7:14 pm on May 15th

Whoops, that message came out looking ‘tarded.

What I meant to say was that I don’t know why THEY removed the slow motion controls from the player, and the only controls on the player are

< > which is for the next media file

Bishop

Posted at 7:15 pm on May 15th

Oh well. I guess this comment board doesn’t like the use of arrows.

Deegeetee

Posted at 8:00 pm on May 17th

Hi Bishop,

If you look at the images above the Fast Forward (>>) & Slow Motion (<<) controls are at each end of the progress bar, which is directly beneath the playback screen. They take the accepted form of merged double arrows, with the playback speed being shown in the box located between media name, and elapsed time boxes.

These controls are found in version 0.9.9, which I use all the time to playback CCTV from my company’s security systems, as well as version 1

Hope that helps