VLC team made their newest release of the VideoLAN Player available to the general public.

VLC 1.1.6 which is now available as a source tarball fixes a security hole that was reported in december 2010 which makes it a recommended upgrade.

A lot of other changes and bugfixes went into the new VLC , you can read all about that on the release notes page. I think that now, the waiting is really for the next revision of VLC (1.2.x) to come out of the git repository and be released as stable. That has been in development for a long time now, and offers a completely re-developed mozilla plugin (the plugin package which accompanies VLC 1.1.x is not really a reliable piece of work) and of course a whole lot of feature enhancements compared to the maturing 1.1.x series.

One of the things that the 1.1.6 version should have fixed is the annoying behaviour in KDE 4.6 where, if you select “Media > Open file” it takes 30 seconds to open a file browser. After that first delay, every subsequent file-open dialog will open instantaneously – strange isn’t it? There is an open bug report for this issue: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260719 and it shows a lot of discussion but no real fix since the KDE and VLC developers basically point to each other to provide a fix. Looks like fixing this in KDE is going to be difficult and VLC would be able to work around the issue. Unfortunately, the code that went into VLC at the last minute (see http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc/vlc-1.1.git;a=commit;h=ac11f9c0e27905087afdfb46180ece227a4d76e7) does not fix it for me.

Enough said. Before I point you to the download location for my Slackware VLC packages, let me humour you with this VideoLAN promotional video made by Adam Vian: http://images.videolan.org/images/vlc-player.mp4 (download first, then load it in VLC). Very funny, worth watching.

Slackware 13.1 packages for vlc-1.1.6 can be found here (32-bit and 64-bit, they will work on slackware-current too of course):

Rsync access: ?rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/

Have fun, Eric