After its debut almost eight and a half years ago, the VideoLAN Client (VLC) media player is finally available in version 1.0.

Even though VDPAU and ffmpeg-mt are still not integrated, VLC developers haven't been sitting on their hands and have brought a few key enhancements to the "Goldeneye" release. VLC now plays DTS TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus surround audio format introduced by Blu-ray, and an uncompromised Blu-ray Linear PCM surround audio no longer shocks the player. The sound format popular on mobile phones, the QCELP codec from Qualcomm Purevoice, is also supported. An improved decoder for WMA 1/2 and RealVideo 3 and 4 is also there.

The demuxer for Blu-ray's M2TS sound format was also improved, as also for the RM and RMVB Real Media containers. The Matroska demuxer also supports Dirac, MLP and RealVideo with MKV files. There's finally an implementation for Blu-ray and AVCHD rendering, although this is still "experimental".

Goldeneye also provides single frame stepping, more precise speed controls, timeshifting, on-the-fly recording for all media, improved subtitles support, surround support for Pulse Audio, on-the-fly decompression of GZIP and BZIP2, a send scanner for the popular DVB-T sticks, global hotkeys, HTML playlist export, numerous improvements in the the QT interface, and compliant interface toolbars.

After its debut almost eight and a half years ago, the VideoLAN Client (VLC) media player is finally available in version 1.0.