VideoLAN has released a new version of their popular VLC Player, an open source and very flexible media player.  It became popular for its versatility in being able to play just about any media file it came across and has built quite a name for its self on the online community.  This new version brings extends support to Blu-ray MPEG-4 lossless and VP8 and it also incorporated GPU decoding on Windows Vista and 7, using DxVA2 for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2.  On Linux it handles the GPU decoding with VAAPI for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2.

All is not well however, as NGOHQ had pointed out to them by a VLC developer, the GPU acceleration only works on nVIDIA and several legacy GPUs.  Intel has not let anyone on the team at the Intel HD integrated graphics so they cannot program to take advantage of that GPU and they describe AMD’s drivers as broken.   Still, the new codec support is nice.

“The good news today on the application front is that the VideoLAN Project has released version 1.1 of the open source VLC Media Player. The new version supports GPU and DSP decoding on a number of platforms, many more video and audio codes, new extensions and has many interface improvements. If you, like me, favor VLC Media Player over all competitors, definitely download the new version.”

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