VideoLanClient (VLC) has been updated to v1.1.0. This new release, which has been codenamed ‘The Luggage’, introduces some much needed improvements to VLC, including support for GPU accelerated decoding. As a result of this, VLC now performs significantly better while playing high-definition (HD) videos. The program code has also been optimized to make VLC leaner and faster. In fact, according to the VideoLanProject, VLC 1.1.0 can provide up to 40% speed-ups, in HD resolutions.

Back in May, we had reviewed the VLC 1.1.0 Release Candidate. Obviously, there haven’t been any significant changes since then. The Luggage introduces encoding and decoding support for WebM and adds a new add-ons and script framework. All the add-ons will fall into two main categories – content add-ons, which will be integrated in the playlist and functionalities extensions, like metadata searching on the web, or subtitles look-ups.

For now, the GPU acceleration works well only on nVidia’s graphics cards due to problems with ATI drivers for Windows and lack of developer access to Intel hardware supporting GPU decoding.

VLC 1.1.0 can be downloaded from here.