VideoLAN Media Player, or just simply VLC, a software designed to run all kinds of media files, ranging from simple DVDs, to video and audio files, and even online streams, is now at version 2.0.4.

VLC has spent years in the 1.x branch, but the developers have increased the pace a little and now they've just released the fourth maintenance release, getting the version to 2.0.4.

As expected, there are a lot of changes, fixes, and improvements, from 2.0.3 to 2.0.4, for all the platforms. We'll just stick with global and Linux specific modifications.

VLC 2.0.4 is mostly all about the bugfixes, repairing stuff such a DVD crash, ALSA digital pass-through, menus display and behavior, and so on. Here is a more detailed view of what's new in VideoLAN Media Player.

Highlights of VideoLAN Media Player (VLC) 2.0.4:

• Playback synchronization with PulseAudio has been vastly improved; • ALSA digital pass-through ("S/PDIF") has been fixed; • Numerous DVD (dvdnav) crashes have been repaired; • HTTP playback through proxy has been repaired; • A bug that caused a TLS busy-loop during client-side handshake has been fixed; • Support for Opus decoding via libopus, including multi-channel files, has been added; • Issues in Ogg with zero length packets have been fixed; • Support for YouTube live streams has been added, finally; • A few crashes that occurred when opening audio effects dialog, with skins and playlist, have been fixed; • Various crashes and small issues including bookmarks, playlist, buttons, streaming wizard, video size, hotkeys and fullscreen controller, have been fixed; • System sleep behavior when playing audio-only media has been improved; • An option has been added to Audio Effects panel, to activate the Karaoke filter; • Notify (D-Bus) plugin deadlock has been repaired; • Blu-Ray and HLS support has been improved.

A complete list of changes and fixes can be found in the official changelog. Also, check our VLC 2.0.0 review we did a while back. Download VideoLAN Media Player (VLC) 2.0.4 right now from Softpedia.