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VLC 1.0.0 Released
rift321 writes "VLC media player, which we all know for simplifying the playback of pretty much any codec out there, has finally released version 1.0.0. Here's a quick list of improvements: live recording, instant pausing and frame-by-frame support, finer speed controls, new HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0), new formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS) and major improvements in many formats, new Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder, video scaling in fullscreen, RTSP Trickplay support, zipped file playback, customizable toolbars, easier encoding GUI in Qt interface, better integration in Gtk environments, MTP devices on Linux, and AirTunes streaming."
VLC 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 can be compiled with VAAPI to get hardware acceleration.
VLC supports hardware acceleration on nVidia G80 and higher hardware using VDPAU on Linux. As soon as ATI releases a XvBA driver, hardware acceleration should be possible through VAAPI.
Any remaining Tiger users needn't bother. As of this version, VLC requires Mac OS X 10.5. This is not obvious from the website.
That does not help. Saying "well, you can just compile in support for ____" shouldn't be acceptable in this day and age. You shoudn't have to compile in support for a given piece of hardware into a player: this is why we have things called "drivers" and "APIs".
That's what the 'API' part of VAAPI is :-)
There's nothing wrong with having compile-time options in open-source software. It's the job of the package and distribution maintainers to abstract this kind of thing away from end users. It'll be a while before this 1.0.0 release filters down to users' desktops through their package managers, which you could wait for and not have to worry about it (this is certainly what I'll be doing)... but if you want the latest and greatest direct from the developers as soon as it's released then you can't complain about having to get your hands a bit dirty.