VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, Ogg, OGM, MOV, wma, wmv...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Features in VLC (VideoLAN Client) 1.0.0 :

- Rewrite of the playlist (tree structure, input preparsing ...)
- Preferences improvements
- XML parsers
- Client-side SSL/TLS support
- Massive Matroska improvements
- Support for SOCKS proxy
- Support for Shoutcast Meta-data
- Support for (HE-)AAC raw-audio streams
- TiVo demuxer
- Samba (Windows shares) access module
- Dirac decoder and encoder
- PNG decoder/encoder
- Support for Apple Lossless Audio Codec
- Services discovery modules (brand new SAP module, HAL discovery, DAAP (iTunes shares), shoutcast)
- Support for 20/24 bits LPCM
- Video snapshot support (png or jpg)
- Image file video output (png)
- Mosaic (picture-in-picture system)
- Pocket PC port
- Brand new Internet Explorer ActiveX plugin
...

Changes from VLC (VideoLAN Client) 0.9.9a to VLC 1.0.0 rc4 :

• Important note:
- Alsa and OSS audio capture has been removed from the v4l and v4l2 accesses. See 'Access:' for more info.
• Playback:
- 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
• Decoders:
- New AES3 (SMPTE 302M) decoder
- New Dolby Digital Plus - E-AC-3 (A/52b) decoder
- New True HD/MLP decoder and parser
- New Blu-Ray Linear PCM decoder
- New QCELP (Qualcomm PureVoice) decoder
- Improved Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 decoder
- New WMA v1/2 fixed point integer decoder
- Closed Captions using the 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
• Demuxers:
- Support for Dirac, MLP and RealVideo in Matroska files
- Major improvements in RealMedia files opening (.rm and .rmvb)
- Improvements of the TS demuxer for M2TS files from Blu-Ray and AVCHD
- Metadata for mod files are supported
- GSM codecs in Wav files are supported
- New raw audio demuxer supporting raw PCM streams
- New Dirac demuxer for raw Dirac streams
• Encoders:
- Dirac encoding using libdirac (supported in Ogg and in TS)
- Shine mp3 fixed-point encoder
• Access:
- RTSP authentication with Darwin Streaming Server
- On-the-fly gzip and bzip2 file decompression (except on Windows)
- Playback for video in uncompressed multi-RAR archives
- DVB-S and ATSC cards support on Windows
- New OSS and Alsa accesses. The v4l2 and v4l modules no longer support OSS or Alsa audio input. Use --input-slave alsa:// or oss:// if needed.
- DVB scanning on linux
- EXPERIMENTAL Blu-Ray Disc and AVCHD Folders support
- On-the-fly zip file decompression and browsing (MRL of the form
zip://file.zip!/file.avi to specify the file - the development form of
zip://file.zip|file.avi is not supported anymore)
- Opening of any file descriptor using 'fd://'
- MTP device access on Unix
- CD-Text support on the cdda module (CD-Audio)
- :start-time and :stop-time can handle sub-second values
• Inputs:
- Mouse cursor support in x11 and win32 screen modules
- Screen module now features partial screen capture and mouse following on Windows and Mac OS X.
• Playlist:
- Export the playlist in HTML
- Lua script for BBC radio playback
- Better metadata handling and reading
• Linux/Windows interface:
* Global Hotkeys on Windows and Linux
* Various fixes for skins2 interface
* Recently played items list
* Interface toolbar customizations
* Various Improvements on the Qt interface:
- More menus actions
- Finer speed slider
- Improvements on many dialogs
- New dialog for plugins listing
- Fixed-size mode for videos
- Better Teletext, trickplay and encrypted streams control
* Better integration in GTK environments
• Stream output:
- Restored the old mpeg2 transrating module.
- Multiple bridge-in instances are now possible.
- bridge-in can be used to configure a placeholder stream.
- Remote Audio Output Protocol (AirTunes) module.
- Fixed mosaic memleak. Mosaics are now usable again.
• Maemo Port:
* New Maemo port with:
- an interface based on Hildon framework.
- scaler based on the swscale_nokia770 library.
• Windows CE Port:
- EXPERIMENTAL work for the winCE port has been done.
• Audio output:
- Removed obsolete Esound and aRts plugins
- Surround support for PulseAudio
• Video output:
- Effects (cube, torus, etc.) removed from OpenGL video output
- Video is able to stay in original size and to zoom in fullscreen (hotkey 'o') while keeping black borders
- Image video output has been rewritten into a video-filter named 'scene'. The old image video output has been removed.
- Support for scaling and converting video chromas with FFMPEG imgresample was withdrawn due to bugs. Please use the newer FFMPEG swscale instead.
• Miscellaneous:
- Invmem, a fake codec to display images from external applications
• New Localization:
- Khmer
- Mongolian
- Sorani