For instance, professional users will find support for ProRes 4, AVC/Intra, Jpeg-2000 and DNxHD/VC-3 in 10bits and a new, faster Dirac/VC-2 encoder, whilst anime fans will be pleased to know VLC 2.0 features a “vastly improved” MKV demuxer. From the strong foundation of VLC 1.x, VLC 2.0 introduces support for new formats – as well as enhancements and fixes for the currently supported ones – with better handling of H.264, MPEG-4/Xvid and WebM thanks to multi-threaded decoding, support for 10bits codes and WMV image, completely rewritten support for images, changes in RealVideo and Real Format integration, correct support for FLAC, RV and Hi10p in MKV, and a plethora of other minor adjustments and refinements that contribute to making VLC one of the most (if not the most) versatile and customizable media players around. If you weren’t aware of all its functionalities and secrets, you’d say VLC’s best feat is the fact that it can launch almost any kind of file you throw at it. Often regarded as “the media player that can open almost anything”, VLC has indeed become many’s de-facto choice over the years when it comes to dealing with a variety of video file formats, or audio files that other media players such as iTunes won’t open.

It can be downloaded for free from VideoLAN’s website. I didn’t know, however, that work on the next major version of VLC, VLC 2.0, had already begun in 2008 with the first concepts and technical drafts, with Lunettes being the complete rewrite of the application that stemmed from that original vision that eventually led to VLC version 2.0, released today.Īvailable for Mac, Windows, and Linux machines, VLC 2.0 is a major update that brings several new optimizations on the technical side, new features, and a brand-new Mac interface that we’ve already covered here on MacStories. Lunettes was promising, and it proved that VLC could have an interface design more suitable for the needs of the Mac community.

Back then, I used to spend a good portion of my days fiddling with media players and skins for VLC, which I used to access a well-organized media library on my MacBook Pro and various external hard drives. Back in February 2010, I wrote a post for MacStories about Lunettes, a codename of a new interface for VideoLAN’s popular media player VLC.

Videolan mac