By Nick Peers
VideoLan.org has released a minor update to its video playback tool,VLC Media Player. VLC 1.1.6 is a minor release that contains a few minor new features, plus consists mainly of bug fixes and security improvements.
VLC Media Player is both cross-platform and open-source, and is capable of playing a wide variety of video and audio formats without the need for additional codecs or downloads. It can also be used for playing back DVD movies -- a capability that first made it popular with Windows XP users (XP has no built-in capabilities for playing DVDs). Version 1.1.6 comes two months after version 1.1.5 was released last year -- over 58 million downloads of the last version have been recorded by VideoLan.org.
VLC 1.1.6 contains a number of codec and demuxer updates, which include security patches. Support has been introduced for MIDI on the Mac OS platform, and MPC SV7/SV8 format on both Mac and Windows platforms. There's also support for RTP/PCM 24-bit audio, projectM visualisations in Windows, plus improvements have been made to KDE and PulseAudio integration, subtitles, visualisations and interfaces. There's also a performance update in that Webm/VP8 decoding is now quicker than in previous versions. These tweaks are all in addition to other unspecified "miscellaneous" fixes.
VLC Media Player 1.1.6 is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux platforms, along with a separate iOS build for iPad and iPhone 3GS/4 users.
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