Paris, Feb 27 2015
New VLC releases
VideoLAN and the VLC development teams are proud to publish a major new release of VLC.
The 2.2.0 release of VLC media player for the desktop is coordinated, for the first time ever, with releases on iOS, Android (including Android TV), WinRT (Windows RT and x86) and Windows Phone. VLC runs everywhere!
Those releases are the result of more than one year of volunteer work, add numerous new features, fix more than one thousand bugs and improves the scope of the formats supported.
The releases on all the platforms share the same core to support video and audio formats, named libVLC: VLC plays everything!
News
So, what's new in VLC 2.2.0, codename WeatherWax?
- Fight the popular vertical video syndrome! VLC automatically detects rotated videos and rotates them using hardware acceleration (on compatible platforms)!
- This is supported for MP4/MOV, MKV and raw H264.
- Resume playback where you left off. Supported on all the mobile versions of VLC for quite some time, it is now available on the desktop.
- Vastly improved support for UltraHD video codecs like VP9 and H265, including encoding.
- New hardware acceleration mechanism, GPU 0-copy decoding, faster and implementations for Linux, Android, and Raspberry Pi. (Other OSes will have it in 3.0.0)
- Extensions: supported since a long time, we now feature an in-app downloader for the desktop, like Firefox
- Subtitles downloading extension
- Compatibility with a very large number of unusual codecs
- Vastly improved compatibility for problematic files in Ogg, MP4, and WMV.
- Support for Digital Cinema Package to play native movie theater formats.
- Experimental support of Interactive Menus of BluRays: BD-J
- On OS X, we've updated the interface for Yosemite compatibility.
- On Android, we rewrote most of the UI to match Google Material Design.
- This is the first public beta releases for Windows Phone, Windows RT and Android TV.
- It is also the first non-beta release on Android.
This is made possible through a lot of improvements of the VLC engine, the libVLC library, which starts showing its maturity and solidity.
Therefore, today, we release:
- VLC media player 2.2.0
- VLC for iOS 2.4.1
- VLC for Android 1.1.0
- VLC for Android TV 1.1.0
- VLC for WinRT 1.1.0
- VLC for Windows RT 1.1.0 Beta
- VLC for Windows Phone 1.1.0 Beta
We hope that you like our new release as much as we do and we are looking forward to answer any question you might have.
Quotes
Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of the VideoLAN non-profit:
"I'm very happy about those releases. Moving VLC to the mobile world was difficult, but the difficult is done. VLC runs everywhere, plays everything. We're working on many new features for VLC 3.0.0 to finish what we've started here."
"We're quite happy to see that libVLC and the libVLC SDK on all platforms are now demonstrating that this framework is now ready for production."
Felix Paul Kühne, secretary of the VideoLAN non-profit and iOS Lead Developer:
"Synchronizing the release leads to an unprecedented level of run-time stability and future innovation. We are excited about sharing further results from that work later this year."
Ludovic Fauvet, treasurer of the VideoLAN non-profit:
"The VideoLAN community shows this time again an unprecedented level of professionalism in releasing VLC media player 2.2.0 simultaneously on all supported platforms. This is a groundbreaking change that any contributor can be proud of."
Notes on 3.0.0
So far, the development on VLC 3.0.0, which will be released later this year, brings hardware decoding and acceleration to more platforms, a better support for mp4, adaptive streaming and TS streams and a partial ChromeCast integration.
About VideoLAN
VideoLAN is a non-profit organization, with no employees, that supports the development of free and open source multimedia solutions.
There is no business model under VLC usage, and VLC is completely free: we don't use any ads, any spyware or other mis-features, that could be deceptive to the users.
Links
VLC:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
VLC 2.2.0
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.2.0.htmlVLC for Android and Android TV:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.vlcVLC for iOS:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/vlc-ios/id650377962VLC for Windows Phone:
http://www.windowsphone.com/s?appid=44fa83f7-a98d-4647-b9d4-c35ed729d0c9VLC for Windows RT:
http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/vlc-for-windows-8/c527ff2d-b5d0-45b6-bfc3-92fb7357ef72
Press Contact
press@videolan.org
