VLC Player 1.1 – with hardware acceleration, but not on ATI

VLC Player has been one of the best (and free) media players on the market. Development team VideoLan are a non profit French organisation who have been behind this great little player for many years now and their recent version 1.1 offers a plethora of new features which our readers will love.

Codenamed “The Luggage”, it now offers GPU accelerated decoding of various video formats on both Windows and Linux platforms with improved support for MKV HD.

Much recoding has gone on behind the scenes to make the application more streamlined and powerful and the improved decoding performance should provide gains of up to 40 percent when compared to the previous version. CD Text under windows and DVD Audio files are also supported.

Due to a legal wrangle however SHOUTcast is no longer offered as the module was removed due to AOL. In order for VideoLan to include SHOUTCAST Radio support they would have had to bundle the Radio toolbar as part of AOL's new strict licensing requirements – they are urging people unhappy with this to lodge complaints with AOL themselves.

Strangely VideoLAN have commented on Video acceleration and issued the following statement : “it is quite sad to be forced to recommend NVIDIA GPU, until ATI fixes their drivers on Windows, and until VLC developer get access to some Intel hardware supporting GPU decoding”.

KitGuru says: We will try and get a statement from ATI later today to find out what the problems are. Discuss over here or just leave a quick comment below.

Become a Patron!