Excellent Free Media Player VLC Gets Substantial Cross-Platform Update [1]

VLC media player is one of Gizmo’s top choices [3] in its category and is my own favorite. VideoLAN has just released  version 2.2.0 for Windows, Mac, and Linux and there are quite a few new or improved features. There are also major cross-platform updates with releases for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Here is a list of new features from the VideoLAN press release [4].

• VLC automatically detects rotated  videos and rotates them using hardware acceleration (on compatible  platforms).
• This is supported for MP4/MOV, MKV and raw H264.
• Resume playback  where you left off. Supported on all the mobile versions of VLC for  quite some time, it is now available on the desktop.
• Vastly improved support for UltraHD video codecs like VP9 and H265, including encoding.
• New  hardware acceleration mechanism, GPU 0-copy decoding, faster and  implementations for Linux, Android, and Raspberry Pi. (Other OSes will  have it in 3.0.0)
• Extensions: supported since a long time, we now feature an in-app downloader for the desktop, like Firefox
• Subtitles downloading extension
• Compatibility with a very large number of unusual codecs
• Vastly improved compatibility for problematic files in Ogg, MP4, and WMV.
• Support for Digital Cinema Package to play native movie theater formats.
• Experimental support of Interactive Menus of BluRays: BD-J
• On OS X, we've updated the interface for Yosemite compatibility.
• On Android, we rewrote most of the UI to match Google Material Design.
• This is the first public beta releases for Windows Phone, Windows RT and Android TV.
• It is also the first non-beta release on Android.

For some reason the update function on my previously installed Windows version of VLC could not find the new version. However, I downloaded the new version and it installed as an upgrade with no problems. Download links for various platforms are on this VideoLAN page [5].

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