A week ago, I ran a post about an article comparing 3 popular media players and several commenters pointed out VLC was their choice and were surprised it was left off the list. Well, the popular open source media player users will be happy to know VLC 1.0.0 is now available.

This major release introduces many new features, new formats and new codecs to the VLC multimedia framework and fixes a very high number of bugs that were present in the 0.9.x or 0.8.6 versions.

While I typically do not upgrade immediately after a major release (I prefer to let early adopters find the bugs), going from seemingly perma-beta to a stable release is significant. This appears to be a must get version for VLC users.

Enjoy and please post your thoughts on this new version if you take the plunge.

If you are looking for a media player or are ‘re-evaluating’ the software you are currently using, here is a nice article comparing popular media players.

The players compared are Winamp, MediaMonkey, iTunes and Windows Media Player, all of which are widely used. Features/functions compared are:

• File type support
• Searching/Filtering and Playlists
• Tagging
• Interface speed
• Bloatware analysis
• Library maintenance
• Extras
• Miscellaneous issues

After all is said and done, the author ranks the players in the following order: MediaMonkey, Winamp (close 2nd), Windows Media Player and iTunes. Of course, this is subjective but it still gives you a good overview of the systems are not using.