Out of the various media players available for download out there, one of our favorites is the open source, cross-platform VLC player, or VideoLAN Client as it used to be called. We love this free piece of software for the simple reason that it will play pretty much any media format straight out of the box, not to mention the fact that it is capable of streaming over networks, transcode multimedia files, and is portable. The news we have to report about this handy piece of software is that it recently reached another milestone in its development process with the release of VLC 1.0 RC1 (Release Candidate 1).

“VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, [etc]) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. It doesn't need any external codec or program to work, explains the VideoLAN Project.

With VLC 1.0 RC1, you can expect to get the same functionality you’ve grown to love in this media player, alongside some handy enhancements:
- Instantaneous pausing.
- 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).
- Frame by frame playback.
- Improved speed control.
- Other UI tweaks and enhancements.

If you would like to get VLC 1.0 RC1, a download location is available here.