VLC is one of the most popular third party media players. If you check the download stats on portals such as Softpedia or Betanews, you will notice that it is always listed in one of the top spots.

That's not because of the player's pretty name but the functionality it provides. VLC plays nearly every media format out of the box, without codec hunting and installation.

There are other players, like the excellent SMPlayer that offer that functionality as well, but none managed to reach the popularity of VLC.

The developers of VLC Media Player have just announced on their Twitter account that they will release the first release candidate of VLC 2.0 at the end of the week.

The latest release version right now is VLC 1.1.11 which is available for Windows, Mac OS X, popular Linux distributions and even other operating systems such as Android or OS/2 (anyone still using that).

Once a suitable release candidate has been found, VLC Media Player 2.0 will be released for all operating systems. Existing VLC users likely want to know what they can look forward to in version 2 of the player. Here is a list of important changes taken directly from the latest nightly build of VLC 2.0.

Major Video Core and Outputs rework and rewrite: Subtitles, subpictures and OSD can now be sized and blent inside video outputs x11 (Unix), OpenGL (Unix) and Direct3D (Windows) are such video outputs.

Almost every video filter can now be transcoded

Port to Android, iOS, OS/2 and Win64

Multiple files are now supported inside RAR files

Experimental Blu-Ray Discs support using libbluray

You can now use ffmpeg-mt in conjunction with vlc, to split decoding load on multiple cores. H.264, VP3, VP8, JPEG-2000, Mpeg-4 ASP/DivX and RV3/RV4

are notably concerned.

are notably concerned. C64 SID file playback support of using sidplay2

Support for WMV Images, aka WMVP and WVP2, as used by Photo Story

New video output based on Direct2D for Windows 7 and Vista (with Platform Update), New video output for iOS platform

Probably the biggest improvements are the 64-bit version for Windows, the port to mobile operating systems and Blu-Ray playback support.

You can get a taste of things to come by downloading the latest nightly build from the VLC build server. Remember that nightly versions are not necessarily stable, as they are development builds.

While we are at it: Which media player are you currently using?

Update: First release candidate builds for Mac and Linux have been posted on the VLC ftp server. You can access the change log here.

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