thasoldier

If you've ever struggled to play a file you downloaded from the hinterlands of the Web, you clearly didn't try opening it with VideoLan's VLC media player, a free, hugely popular, and open-source media player. VLC can open anything.

VideoLan released on Thursday version 0.9.9, a bug fix release that corrects a few issues with the previous version.

The best media player just got better and is rapidly approaching 1.0 status.

Version 0.9.9 adds the following improvements to the feature-packed VLC player:

* Fullscreen behavior on Windows with multiple screens.
* Workaround bug with libxml2 >=2.7.3.
* Video performance on Intel-based Macs.
* Various decoders updates on Windows.



In addition:

An experimental native decoder for Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 using FFmpeg has been added and many fixes happened in our Real Media demuxer. This should improve Real Media Files support on all platforms.

If you're an existing VLC user, you might opt to skip this release if you haven't noticed the problems above. But on my Mac, I did notice an improvement in video performance, to the point that in my non-scientific test, the VLC felt like it performed slightly better than Apple's QuickTime and certainly plays a much wider range of video formats. That update alone made the download worth it.

If you've yet to try VLC, do so. Whether you just want to play media files or also want to convert them, VLC can handle just about anything you throw at it. When all other media players fail, whether on Windows, Linux, or the Mac, VLC will almost always deliver.

You can download VLC media player 0.9.9 from Download.com for Windows and Mac. It's open source, but that's not why you'll want to keep using it. You'll use it because it's better than its proprietary peers--by a long stretch.