As its name suggests, VLC Media Player Nightly is the latest, untested version of VideoLAN’s popular cross-platform, opens-source audio and video player to roll off the presses. That means it’s untested, which makes it unstable, and as likely to throw up new bugs as old ones get squashed.
Version 1.3.0 comes with no support at all – VideoLAN makes this clear on its Nightly builds page when it states, “WARNING: The nightly builds are UNSTABLE and may not work at all. There is absolutely NO SUPPORT for it from the VideoLAN Team.”
At the present time, there’s not an awful lot to glean about version 1.3, codenamed “Rincewind” after the wizard of Discworld fame. That’s because VideoLAN is currently putting the finishing touches to version 1.2 (codenamed “Twoflower”) ahead of its official, stable release, so the focus is naturally on that.
While it's not advisable to install the unstable Nightly build, it has provided VLC enthusiasts with an early look at the much-documented features coming in version 1.2.
These include partial support for unencrypted Blu-ray discs and better support for newer DVDs, adaptive streaming, sharper subtitles rendering, support for video output to iOS, Direct2D and Android formats and much more besides. For a full description of what’s coming in version 1.2, courtesy of one of the app’s lead developers (Jean-Baptise Kempf), see here and here.
This article originally appeared at softwarecrew.co.uk
