Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Videolan announced the availability of VLC 1.1.0 a couple of days back. VLC's popularity soared in the mid-2000s when standard definition videos were all the craze, and CPUs were powerful enough to easily decode them. Over the last few years, many people have built up a big library of high definition videos, and one of the complaints against VLC was the fact that all the inbuilt codecs relied completely on the CPU horsepower for decoding. "

GPU acceleration is a topic that is getting hotter by the minute. Recently, there was a report that NVidia's GPUs could process (certain) tasks 14 times faster than the most elite Intel CPU. This excess parallel processing capacity is wasted most of the time, however, it is ideal for playing back video. There have been several other programs or platforms that have done this, from Flash to XBMC, with very impressive results. VLC now joins the club, however, for various technical reasons, only those with relatively current NVidia GPUs will get the accelerated goodness. As AnandTech demonstrates, it definitely lightens the load on the CPU. The only downside is that I am unable to find any mention of whether the acceleration supports the Broadcom HD chip, which would make VLC an ideal client for netbooks that are coming out.

"VideoLAN project's VLC Media Player 1.0.0 is a free software and open source multi-platform solution for media streaming. Windows users can download the installer from download page and it weighs 17MB."

Media available on the Internet is fragmented into dozens, if not hundreds, of different codecs. From Quicktime to Windows Media to Mastroka, it is a constant hassle to make sure you have the right media player for the right file. VideoLAN started the VLC Media Player way back in 2001 as an all-in-one media player. It recently just reached its version 1.0 milestone and is available for download. Why do you want it? Well, the player can handle pretty much any video (or music) file you throw at it that isn't laden with DRM. From mp3s, to avi to AVCHD videos from your camcorders, VLC handles it all without complaints or extra configuration. The most recent update gives it a few tweaks, such as live recording and support for HD codecs. With all those bells and whistles, there are a few minor drawbacks. VLC (though I have not confirmed this with 1.0.0) lacks hardware decoding support and I find the playback interface quite primitive. Still, it is my choice media player, since VLC has handled pretty much everything I have thrown at it. What do you use?