VideoLAN and the VLC development team released the first major release of the 'The Luggage' branch of the popular media player and media framework. This release brings many major improvements, especially: GPU and DSP decoding on selected platforms, new support for codecs, demuxers and muxers, Lua extensions and Lua content extensions (luaSD), improved interfaces, Video Output rework, removal of lots of modules, rewrite of many in order to improve performance, in CPU, RAM and I/O. It introduces also new libVLC and new bindings and improves the port on many platforms.

The latest VLC ver1.1.0 player supports GPU decoding on Windows Vista and 7, using DxVA2 for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2, GPU decoding on GNU/Linux, using VAAPI for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2, DSP decoding using OpenMax IL, for compatible embedded devices. It offers improved support for MKV HD, including seeking fixes, and 7.1 channels codecs and also supports new codecs, like Blu-Ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless and VP8.

So far, on Windows for GPU decoding, VideoLAN is recommending nVidia GPU, until ATI drivers are working with VLC architecture, and until the VLC developers get access to some Intel hardware supporting GPU decoding.

Other improvements of the VLC 1.1.0 player include:

Extensions
New add-ons and script framework so one can personalize its vlc.
* Written in lua
* 2 main types of scripts:
o content add-ons, integrated in the playlist
o functionnalities extensions, like metadata
searching on the web, or subtitles look-ups
* Very Simple

Web improvements
* Support for WebM decoding and encoding
* Improved web plugins
* Better streaming capabilities

Better Audio experience
* Integrated playlist in the Qt4 interface
* Multiple views (like album art) in the playlist in the Qt4 interface
* Support for AMR-NB, Mpeg-4 ALS, Vorbis 6.1/7.1, FLAC 6.1/7.1 and WMAS
* CDDB and CD-Text works now on the Windows port when listening to CD-Audio
* Support for DVD-Audio files (.aob)
* Improved meta-data and album-art support

Faster, Lighter
* Faster decoding, with up to 40% speed-ups, in HD resolutions
* First part of the Video Output core rewrite
* Removal or rewrite of dozens of modules, code simplification and tens of thousands of lines of code removed
* Some functionalities that are less used are now moved to extensions
* More assembly optimizatinons, especially SSSE3/SSE4 and ARM Neon
* Fewer threads used

Better for developers
* Simplified and improved libVLC, removal of exceptions for better C integration
* New phonon-backend for Qt applications, on all platforms
* New C++ bindings

The complete changelog 1.1.0 is available here. For downloads, visit http://www.videolan.org/vlc/.