Quite a while ago a project was started to combine the awesomeness and beauty of VLC with the awesomeness and beauty of Phonon in order to achieve world peace through world domination.

Today the extraordinary Phonon-VLC team released version 0.3 of their Phonon backend. Marking another milestone on the way to a truly cross platform Phonon backend.

Phonon-VLC 0.3 comes with Casian Andrei’s video and audio capture functionality, he implemented as part of his Google Summer of Code project. This makes the VLC backend the first one to implement this new terrific feature, introduced in the recently released Phonon 4.4.3. Additionally an incredible amount of fixes and improvements are part of this release.

We now consider the Phonon VLC backend stable enough for day to day use and encourage everyone to give it a try.

Mark Kretschmann, founder of Amarok said following about this release:

Phonon-VLC is rock solid now. Not a single crash in two weeks. Smooth as butter.

If you want to try the newest release, either poke a distribution developer near you to get a ready to go package for you distribution or compile the source yourself, following the excellent guide by Myriam Schweingruber.

Have fun, I already do… 😉