VideoLAN released the second major version of their popular media player on Saturday. The new version is a complete rewrite, and features faster decoding, experimental Blu-Ray support, and more.

With faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs, 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC.

Features

• Simple, Powerful and Fast
• Plays everything, Files, Discs (DVD, CD, VCD, Blu-Ray), Webcams and Streams
• Plays most codecs with no codec packs needed: MPEG-2, H.264, DivX, MPEG-4, WebM, WMV player
• Completely Free, n0 Spyware, Ads or User Tracking
• Works on most platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Unix…
• Media Converter and Streamer

There are plenty of other changes and improvements as well, which can be seen in the official release notes. VLC is great for many reasons, not the least of which is its ability to support almost every audio and video format known to man, including many that don’t work natively under OS X, such as .mkv files and Windows Media.

VLC 2.0 is a solid update, and I highly recommend downloading it now!