VLC, the popular media player, has reached the major milestone of version 2.0. The player’s strong suit has always been its ability to play almost all formats and encodings out of the box without needing to hunt down the proper codec. That continues to be the case but version 2.0 brings with it some new features and fixes as well.
With faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs, 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC.
Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos.
It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental).
Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use.
Twoflower fixes several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers.
A more detailed list of the new features is available and you can download VLC 2.0 at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.0.0.html
As an anime fan, I’m excited to see the improvements with MKV demuxing and Hi10p support. One cool feature I have spotted already that I’m not sure was in previous versions is the chapter segments shown when you hover over the timeline. This makes it easy for you to find your place, skip the intro or ending credits in order to get to your show faster.