VLC is one of those open-source gifts to humankind that we certainly don’t deserve. A lightweight, bloat-resistant, stable, and endlessly compatible piece of software that we mostly use to play back pirated movies.
The brand-new 3.0 “Vetinari” update to VLC adds an incredible number of features. It has HDR10 support. It does HD audio passthrough. It’s hardware accelerated on all platforms, which gives it enough horsepower to do 4K and 8K playback on regular phones and computers. It can Chromecast videos that aren’t natively supported by Chromecast. It works with Blu-ray Java menus! It’s even optimized for the iPhone X’s notch.
But, most importantly: VLC 3.0 adds support for HD DVD .evo files.
So long, PowerDVD! Now I can watch my mint copy of Peter Jackson’s King Kong on my video player of choice.
What a time to be alive.
