VLC 2.1.1
So, we’ve released today VLC 2.1.1. It’s mostly a release to fix the numerous bugs and regressions that always happen at major.0 releases.
But why are there so many regressions at every major releases of VLC?
The main two reasons are:
- we still don’t have enough people testing the prebuilt and release candidates versions…
- our major releases cycle is too long.
While I don’t know what to do for the first, we will shorten our development cycle, starting from 2.2.0.
New formats
But for once, this release introduces new features, notably a new decoder to support HEVC (H.265).
We did that because we could not ignore this major codec and introduce it only at our next major release.
We worked quite a bit on Opus and VP9, because we want to help pushing those formats.
As for HEVC, VP9 and Opus integrations are quite young, so you should expect issues or shortcomings…
Updates path
As you might have seen, we have not pushed 2.1.0 through the update system, for the reasons you’ve seen above.
But 2.1.1 is different and will be pushed through the update system.
Windows installer
On Windows, 2.1.1 introduces a new installer that will allow us to upgrade to future versions without asking the options at every install! 2.1.1 should be the last annoying installer that you will see on Windows.
Mac OS X 2.0.9
We did a release of source for 2.0.9, but unlike on Windows, we did binaries too for Mac OS X. Why is that?
Well, as you might have seen, we’ve discontinued VLC for PowerPC and Intel32 for 2.1.x. This is mostly for technical reasons, (notably to support correctly OS X.9), but also for timing reasons (there are few Intel macs that are 32bit only, and it’s time consuming to support them).
So PowerPC users will upgrade to 2.0.9, where we fixed many bugs affecting them, as one would expect.
But, a contrario from what you would expect, Intel32 and Universal Binary users on 2.0.8 will be upgraded to the 2.0.9 Universal Binary.
This will allow users using the Intel32 version of VLC but running on a 64bit-capable machine to upgrade to a 64bit version of VLC. Indeed, the 64bit slice of this UB will upgrade to 2.1.1 afterwards, but not the 32bit slice which might upgrade to 2.0.10, if ever there is one :)
I hope this clears a few questions…