VLC Media Player 1.1 Release Candidate 1 Available

Today, VideoLAN organization releases a new version of VLC Media Player 1.1 Release Candidate 1 which supports new WebM video and GPU and DSP decoding etc.

VLC Media Player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN organization. Today, VideoLan release the first release candidate of VLC Media Player 1.1 which improves with many changes and fixes such as supporting the new WebM video format, which Google open-sourced at its developers conference last week, supporting for hardware-based decoding of H.264-encoded video on some platforms.

Most importantly, VLC Media Player 1.1 supports GPU and DSP decoding, depending on the platform and becomes faster and stable. Two H.264-encoded QuickTime movie files played in both the previous version 1.0.5, and the current release candidate to see the CPU usage differences. For the smaller of the two files, VLC Media Player 1.0.5 of VLC used about 16.5% of the CPU to play the file, whereas the current version uses around 12.5%. For the larger movie, version 1.0.5 takes about 35-40% of the CPU, and version 1.1 takes around 26-30% at the same scenes.

The release of a standalone player for WebM video represents a significant step for the adoption of the new video format. Up until now, users had to download special nightly builds of Firefox, Chrome or Opera to play WebM videos on their systems, and not everyone is committed to running what can essentially be considered an unstable browser version on their machine.

Other functions also include new codecs and HD codecs enhancements; MKV, mp4 and avi improvements; important code cleanup and rewrite; interface and playlist reworked etc.

They are really a decent improvement in performance while VLC Media Player 1.1 RC 1 is a release candidate, which means it has left the "Beta" status but is not yet an official release. As a result it may have one or two quirks, but the major issues with the development of this version have been tackled.