Features Coming For The VLC 2.1 Media Player

The VLC 2.1 media player update is due out in the coming weeks and with it will come several new features for the open-source program.

After the excitement this morning about the VLC port to Qt 5 nearly working, I decided to check in on the state of VLC 2.1 -- the next major release for the project -- and what features it shall possess.

According to the project's Trac, VLC 2.1 should be ready in about two weeks time. The VLC 2.1 code-base has already been in code-freeze since April.

Major VLC 2.1.0 features will include:

- An audio core rewrite.
- An audio fingerprinter has been integrated into VLC Core.
- Support for the Opus audio codec via libopus.
- Support for other new codecs via libavcodec.
- Hardware acceleration on OS X for H.264 using VDADecoder
- Hardware acceleration on Android Jelly Bean using MediaCodec.
- Support for VDPAU hardware video decoding on Linux.
- Blu-ray module improvements.
- The V4L2 access module has been rewritten.
- Support for Microsoft Smooth Streaming.
- View-only support for RDP Remote Desktop and VNC/rfb.
- New audio filters.
- The OpenGL video output now uses GLSL for handling YUV to RGB conversions.
- The OpenGL ES1/ES2 module is now enabled.
- Partial support for Qt 5.0.

This is quite a feature-rich release that's due out soon from partial Qt 5.0 support to new GL happenings to the Linux version finally having VDPAU video acceleration support. More details on the plethora of changes to be found in VLC 2.1.0 can be found in the NEWS file.