The media player battle heats up: VLC 1.0 released

On Monday I published a nice review of Smplayer in which I explained why it was my favorite cross-platform media player. On Tuesday the people behind VLC decided to challenge this by releasing a new and improved VLC, the much awaited version 1.0. Things sure do move fast in the technology field! It is still too soon to say if this new VLC release will really challenges Smplayer's position as my favorite media player or if it simply narrows the gap between the two applications, but what is sure is that it does improve on previous versions.

New VLC features

Version 1.0 of adds a few important features. The first is the addition of several HD codecs:

· Blu-Ray Linear PCM
· Dolby Digital Plus
· AES3
· TrueHD
· Real Video 3.0 and 4.0

This should allow the playback of a decrypted Blu-ray image stored on your hard disk. Since I don't have a Blu-ray player I will not be able to test this, but it is very nice to see progress being made toward Blu-ray playback on Linux. The major remaining hurdle is of course the decryption process, but at least the codec work is done. The support of the Realvideo codecs is also a nice addition, although I am not sure these are widely used.

Another nice feature is the support for MTP devices. This should allow VLC to access media files stored on a portable media player that was designed to synchronize with Windows Media Player such as the creative Zen vision.

Conclusion

Does this means that VLC is displacing Smplayer as my favorite media player? It remains to be seen. VLC now has the advantage for the number of supported codecs and the number of features, but for me Smplayer still has the advantage of a nicer UI and better keyboard controls. What will be a major factor is performance: historically VLC has always been behind Mplayer in term of performance, but recently they have narrowed the gap quite nicely. Although it is not very important on modern desktop computers performance can be most critical on netbooks with limited processing power. I will perform some benchmarking and publish a more complete shootout of both players in the coming weeks to settle the question, so stay tuned.