VLC 0.8.6 was released yesterday. For me, it is a very special release, because it is the first release I really feel from the inside.
However, this release is a bit a bastard release, since the main upgrades are from FFMPEG updates or only for Mac Users. And there are a lot of bugfixes, that will help the forum to be a bit less overloaded.
I am waiting so much to see next release (0.9.0).
Main features
- WMV, WMA, FLV partial support
- Wavpack, TTA support
- H264 improvements
- Notifications
- And a lot of stuff for MacOS…
Comments
- Windows 9x/ME is not officially supported anymore, mainly because of the network layer. However, it still works with not many problems, but there is no official support. Maybe next release will be more problematic with these old OSes. For those users, you can upgrade to this version, but please change OS !
- BeOS’s version has been very difficult to build because of GCC 2.95. I think the trunk does not work anymore on BeOS. And FFMPEG thinks of dropping BeOS support…
- SuSE malediction is finished ! Indeed, since we refused the SuSE maintener role to Voldemort, we had a lot of SuSE developpers that proposed to package VLC, but none of them stayed enough to make an actual VLC package… :D Now, Domique (dimstar) had taken the job, and we all helped him.
- Next version will be 0.9.0 with a new playlist-media library, new plugins, new libVLC, more bindings, more codecs and a new GUI using Qt4.
New skin
I also just wanted to show a very beautiful skins that was made by Anton Boskovski.
It is a skin that uses the latest skins2 improvements that were made during 0.8.6 development. You should give this one a try. For once, it is not a pale copy of another player. I hope we can make a skin contest for next release.
Team
The VideoLAN team is very cool, but really short-staffed, with only a few people actually working on it. The support is very difficult to do, because of all the modules of VLC, and people who want a lot of different features, that we cannot make. But, for me, it is a good experiment, and I found it very funny. Let’s hope, I ’ll become a VLC guru, one day.