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VLC 2.0 'Twoflower' Released For Windows & Mac
Titus Andronicus writes "Years in the making, the major new release of VideoLAN's media player has better support for multicore processors, GPUs, and much, much more. From the announcement: '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.'"
If we can get by the neckbeard virgin jokes, its actually a good idea for them to specifically target anime-watching (especially the fansub community) in their notes. For years, there has been the complaint that, compared to such offerings as Media Player Classic Home Cinema, especially with lots of external filters from something like the Combined Community Codec Pack, VLC was inferior. Subtitles were not rendered as aesthetically pleasingly, image quality may have suffered, and other factors made VLC a second player choice despite its internal filters and easy accessibility.
The anime fansub community has pioneered the usage of initially arcane formats, expecting exacting quality and often utilizing features that would be an afterthought for most other media. Matroska container formats,H.264/ X264 HD video, Ogg Theora/OGM, multi-channel AAC/OGG/ audio, multiple streams of the aforementioned plus multiple softcoded subtitle options, etc.. showed up prominently in anime fansub encodes long before the general population ever saw them. Some would say their pioneering encoding even helped drive pirate rips of SD and HD content out of old-fashioned AVI containers for everything, besides being a huge boon to localization in any form as these advances helped to move from single language audio and subtitle options hardcoded (or hand-selected-and-renamed-manual-subs) to simple container formats with multiple options. Today, we're seeing many fansub release groups offering 1080p high bitrate MKV with lossless FLAC audio channels and 10-bit color pallets...even for porn!
Anime fansubs/localization has been a quiet but important force in driving online video quality from the days of grainy, option-free rips to a single high-bitrate HD file with several lossless audio channels and subtitles for 8 languages available, often using open specifications and open source codecs to do so. VLC setting the bar for these enthusiasts who really move the media forward is certainly commendable in my opinion, compared to saying "Well, if it runs content purchased off iTunes, its good enough!".