VLC 2.0 Aka ‘Twoflower’ Released, Brings Bluray Playback Support, New Interface and Much More

Easily the world’s most versatile video player VLC, just got a second major version bump to 2.0 codenamed Twoflower.

The libre and open source project which started way back in 1996, has come a really long way. VLC is perhaps the only multimedia player to show its presence in all the major platforms viz. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and even unheard of platforms like BeOS, BSD(all variants), HP’s QNX, IBM OS/2 and syllable. VLC was last updated to 1.1.11 on Windows and 1.1.13 on Linux platforms.

What’s New?

1. New Interface

The first reaction when you check out the new VLC player is the slimmed down playback toolbar, which looks much cleaner. Surprisingly, VLC this time even has much better seeking than the predecessors, which always had been an issue with VLC.

2. Coverflow

Amongst the other visible changes is the addition of coverflow in the playlist and media library.

Now you can dock the VLC full screen controller to the bottom, which was missed peculiarly in VLC.

GPU acceleration is now much better and marked stable , which was labelled as experimental in the prior versions.

3. For Mac

But what will make the Windows and Linux versions look ugly as hell is the shiny new interface sported by the Mac version of VLC. It even comes up in two different colours, grey and black to match OSX Lion style. Now that’s what we call unfair.

More New Features in Bullet Style™

While you may be sorely disappointed by the changes on the surface of VLC 2.0, you will be more than happy when you sit up and take notice of the major work that has happened under the hood of the favourite media player. As this release is a major version bump rather than a point release, naturally implying it encompasses several hundred bug fixes and changes. We highlight the major changes for end users

• MultiCore Support: VLC now has multi-core video decoding support for major formats, which will show up as real performance benefits for most PC users.
• Improved GPU Acceleration: It has been improved vastly, and it has been changed to stable from experimental in VLC 2.0
• Blu-ray Playback Support! Though, it currently (and may be even in the future) can not play copy protected Blu-ray Discs due to legal issues.
• Even more file formats: VLC 2.0 has support for more formats than before, with rewritten video output modules for Windows 7, iOS and Android
• Multiple files are now supported inside RAR files, a really cool feature now even better.
• MKV playback, which has been a gripe in VLC for quite a long time has received much needed attention of developers in twoflower.
• Improved Web Plugins: VLC’s web plugins are rewritten for more stability in all the browsers
• Audio core has been simplified for faster processing and also contains new resamplers for high quality audio.

Interesting facts

Apparently, there was a native 64 bit version planned for Windows, which got shelved by the time of release for some reasons. The native 64 bit version might be released for version 2.1 Rincewind. If you still want 64 bit version, you can try the nightly builds of VLC 2.1 here.

VLC for Android is currently in development state but you can try the unofficial pre-alpha build of VLC. While interestingly the iOS version of VLC was removed from the app store following the complaints of a VideoLan developer. However you are free to download the binary manually and install.