VLC 1.10 released

VLC is one of those apps that almost does too many things. Most people use it to decode (watch) videos. But VLC can also encode, stream, transcode, and runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, BeOS, and BSD, and I’m sure it will launch on Android/iOS in the future.

While I use Linux exclusively at home, I’m often required to use Windows at work and when I use other people’s computers. For this reason I love using cross platform apps. OpenOffice.org, VLC, Dropbox, Firefox, Google Chrome and Pidgin are some of the more successful variants.

VLC 1.10 was released today, and it’s a big release. In fact, it’s codenamed the luggage.

The main improvements are HD Hardware decoding (Windows and Linux), improved MKV support, support for WebM, and of course, it’s faster and more stable. To see the other changes, check the changelog.

One of the reasons VLC works so well on multiple Operating Systems is because it uses the QT toolkit (is a cross-platform application development framework). This framework runs on almost all Operating Systems including Mobile variants like Symbian and Maemo. If you use VLC on Windows/Mac, be sure to update. If you use it on Linux, you’ll have to wait for your distribution to add it to their repositories, which in the case of Ubuntu will mean waiting for Ubuntu 10.10 (yet another reason I use Arch Linux).