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VLC is an extremely powerful, features rich, cross-platform multimedia player that’s very popular. However, I don’t know why, but I never quite liked it that much. That’s not to say that it’s bad or anything, but it wasn’t the best that I’ve used.

So usually, I tend to use players that use the MPLayer (another very powerful open source multimedia player) as the engine, such as the Media Player Classic, KMPlayer … (in Windows) or the MPlayer itself in GNU/Linux, as they use less system resources and efficient while decoding.

However, according to the VLC’s release page, the 2.0 version (which was released few hours ago) brings a lot of improvements & features, plus somewhat a clean looking UI.

Few of the new major features in the 2.0 version that are worth mentioning …

*. Added Blu-Ray disk playback (still experimental), however they say that the “menus” are disabled, but should be enabled pretty soon.

*. Added support for QTKit (a multimedia framework created by Apple) based devices.

*. Faster Video decoding with Multi-Core CPU chips (plus GPU) in formats such as H.264 (video codec in HD/Blu-Ray format). Xvid/MPEG4 and WebM.

*. New re-sampling filters to enhance the audio outputs.

*. And also the famous “web interface” (that lets you run videos in your Web Browser using VLC) is also refreshed.

These are just a fraction of new features to mention.

To get more information about the new release and download it, please visit this VLC 2.0 Release notes page.

Concerning the GNU/Linux users …

Because of the wide variety of package formats used in GNU/Linux distributions, it’s a bit of hectic task to provide packages to all the distributions. So the VLC developers advice GNU/Linux users to look in their distribution’s official software repositories for the new 2.0 update.

For Ubuntu users …

However, thanks to the popularity of the Ubuntu Linux, VLC team has a PPA of their own in Launchpad which provides latest updates & and cutting edge packages.

**Update: VLC 2.0 has landed in Ubuntu 12.04, thus if you use that version of Ubuntu then then just use the below command install it.

sudo apt-get install vlc

**

So, if you want (heck ya you do! ;-)), you can install VLC 2.0 (2.1 actually, since these are the daily builds rather than the official release) media player in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, 11.04 Natty Narwhal and 10.10 by using their official PPA.

For that, open your Terminal and enter the below commands.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:videolan/master-daily sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install vlc

Note: But please remember that, this PPA includes the “cutting edge”, daily build packages, and might not give you the most stable versions of VLC.

But for both Ubuntu 12.04 and 11.10 users can use the below PPA instead, which should also give you latest up-to-date (daily) packages, but they are stable ones (unlike with the above mentioned cutting edge packages, this PPA currently holds the official 2.0 version). For that, instead of the above commands, please use the below ones.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:videolan/stable-daily sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install vlc

Although if you don’t feel comfortable using “daily builds”, then within few hours or so, VLC 2.0 packages should arrive at the official Ubuntu repositories for both 12.04 (update: it’s available already!) and 11.10 users.

However, I don’t know if they’ll give 2.0 updates to the other older versions of Ubuntu though (so if you use older versions of Ubuntu, then perhaps you’d be better off with these PPAs instead ;-)).

Another thing, I totally respect your choice of VLC, and maybe it’s the new audio filters, however, while playing a video in VLC and Totem (don’t like it that much either :P), VLC used like 8%-9% more of my CPU cycles (usages) than Totem did.

But other than that, the rest assured, it has a very clean look and the responsive times are also improved, so yes, it’s looking good. Good luck.