Article by George Norman

On 23 Dec 2009

Here at FindMySoft we are big fans of the VLC media player. We like that it doesn’t cost a thing, works on various platforms, and play pretty much any media type straight out of the box. For those of you that already have VLC installed on your system, the VideoLAN team has a surprise for you – a Christmassy surprise that is.

Hidden in the VLC code there is an Easter egg which modifies the VLC icon from the taskbar. Normally you would see a little construction cone in the taskbar. The construction cone has not gone anywhere, it is still there. But to celebrate the winter holydays, the cone is wearing a Santa hat. The whole week of Christmas, the VLC cone icon in the taskbar will keep wearing the Santa hat.


The 1.0 version of the VLC media player was released this summer. It was a big deal because it marked an important milestone in the software’s development process – the move out of RC (Release Candidate) status and the release as a stable software application. The software came with the following features:
- Open-source, cross-platform
- Plays most video types without needing codecs
- Customize the toolbars
- Live recording
- Instant pausing
- Frame-by-Frame support
- Finer speed controls
- New HD codecs: AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, and so on)
- New formats: Raw Dirac, M2TS, etc.
- New Dirac encoder
- MP3 fixed-point encoder
- Full screen video scaling
- Support for RTSP Trickplay
- Zipped file playback
- Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
- Better integration in Gtk environments
- MTP devices on Linux
- AirTunes streaming
- New skin for the skins2 interface
- On the fly recording for all media types, on the fly zip file decompression and browsing, on the fly gzip and bzip2 file decompression.
- Timeshift for most media types.
- New Blu-Ray Linear PCM decoder. Experimental Blu-Ray disc and AVCHD folder support.
- New and enhanced video and audio decoders, encoders, demuxers.
- Global hotkeys for Windows and Linux.
- Support for modern Apple keyboards, meaning that VLC is controllable via the Media Keys (Mac OS X only).
- Support fro DVB-S and ATSC cards (Windows only).
- Improved speed control.

• Check out our VLC review here.
  
• Download VLC straight from FindMySoft here.
  
• Learn how to install VLC by checking out this tutorial.

Tags: VLC, VideoLAN, Media Player, Christmas, Santa

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