Windows/Mac/Linux: Wildly popular open-source media player VLC has updated to version 2.0 and brought a mountain of new and upgraded features with it–including enhanced codec support, hardware decoding, and experimental Blu-ray support.

The new release is a substantial overhaul of the VLC platform that includes a rewritten video output core, half a dozen new video filter algorithms to clean up video and provide a smoother viewing experience, audio resamplers, faster audio processing, multi-thread processor support for popular video formats like H.264, enhanced hardware support for CrystalHD cards and other hardware decoders, and even experimental support of Blu-ray playback.