VLC Media Player 2.0.4 supports Opus decoding

Version 2.0.4 of the VLC Media Player has been released by the VideoLAN project. While the minor version number change may not reflect it, the new release is described as a major update by its developers as it fixes numerous regressions and introduces support for the IETF's Opus lossy audio compression format. It also brings several other improvements and platform-specific changes.

Among the improvements in VLC 2.0.4 are better support for Blu-ray and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), updates to YouTube and Vimeo streaming, and the addition of support for MSS1 and MSS2 decoding through DirectX Media Objects (DMO) libraries. Other changes include PulseAudio playback synchronisation enhancements, updated translations, and fixes for crashes related to DVD playback and for playback problems affecting the Ogg and MKV container formats.

On Mac OS X, an option to activate the karaoke filter has been added to the Audio Effects panel and, when playing back audio-only media, the sleep behaviour has been updated to allow the screen to sleep but keep the system awake during playback. Behaviour changes to the command-line options for controlling the Mac interface, and menu display and behaviour updates are among the other Mac-specific changes. Additionally, the developers note that, under 10.5 Leopard, CoreAnimation effects have been deactivated.

According to the release announcement, the update also addresses multiple security issues; however, at the time of writing, specific details of these have yet to be published on the security advisories page.

VLC for Android, which is currently in beta, was also recently updated. Version 0.6 of the mobile VLC app brings further improvements to the user interface and tablet-mode, and fixes audio glitches as well as issues related to hardware decoding on Android 4.1.x "Jelly Bean". VLC for Android Beta is available from the Google Play store.

The release notes and the change log list all of the fixes and enhancements in the new desktop VLC version. VLC Media Player 2.0.4 can be downloaded for various operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Source code and binaries for VLC are licensed under the GPLv2.

See also:

• VLC Player 2.0 released, a report from The H.

(crve)