The King of Players, VLC 1.1 is finally released and ready to Rule

Waaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

That's me, with a Vuvuzela celebrating the release of the mighty VLC 1.1 . If you are a frequent reader at Linuxers, you would know that we have been cheerleading a lot about VLC 1.1 since its early development phase. Its not just us, the player is worth it, VLC 1.1 is probably the most awaited release compared to any VLC ever! It takes a Media player to a whole new level by introducing Extensions.

VLC 1.1, codenamed The Luggage, named after a large chest from the novel series DiscWorld. The significance of the chest in the novel was its usefulness to its master and thats exactly how this release is going to turn out for you.

Just let me quickly summarise the whole list of new features and improvemnts:

• Improved HD support - Faster decoding with upto 40% speedups, in HD resolutions.
• GPU decoding on both Windows and Linux, making it faster and lighter on the CPU.
• Support for new codecs including Blue-Ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless and newly released VP8.
• Developers have paid a lot of attention to reduce the resource consumption. VLC 1.1 is designed to use less RAM and threads.
• Some of the functionalities which are not frequently used have been ported to extensions.
• And ofcourse, the introduction of Extensions, one of the major improvements.
• Decoding and Encoding support for the recently released WebM format.
• Better Streaming capabilites
• Now, it also supports visualizations.

...the list can go on. Seriously, what else do you want me to do, to make you grab a copy and run the superstar on your system.

Install VLC 1.1 on Ubuntu Linux

There is a PPA available from Christopher Korn. The latest package in the PPA is the 4th release candidate of VLC 1.1, which was the last update before the release, so there shouldn't be much difference between the final stable release.

In order to install the PPA, just run the following commands.

[shredder12]$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:c-korn/vlc

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get update

Now, if you don't have VLC already installed then either click this link(if fails, see apturl) or run this command to install it.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install vlc

and if you are already running some version then go to System->Administration->Update Manager, you will see vlc 1.1 rc4 in the list. Install it.