Interface

A new interface module based on the Qt toolkit has been added to VLC. If you are a GNOME or Xfce user, before trolling, please read this.

This new interface module has a few improvements on the old one:

* Simplified settings and dialogs
* Media library integration
* Album art displaying and metadata editing
* Live activation of Video and audio filters
* Basic encoding profiles
* Multiple start modes (classic, enhanced and minimalist)
* System tray icon and minimizing
* Fullscreen controller

And many other improvements and bug-fixes.

Moreover, some global hotkeys plugin can be found on the forum.
Playlist

The playlist has been improved in many ways, in addition to the new Media Library (very simple so far, but will be extended in the future):

* Live Searching in the playlist,
* Youtube, Dailymotion, Google Video and similar services URL can be scripted in VLC to play directly those URLs,
* last.fm submission support,
* Album art support,
* Better metadata tagging reading and writing support for audio files.

Playback

A lot of new decoders, demuxers, and protocols have been added.

There are new codecs support, like Flash video variants, camcorder codecs (M2TS ones), Dirac, Atrac3, H.264 PAFF, APE audio, RealVideo, VC-3, Fraps and others, but also better decoding and better performance. Many thanks to the FFmpeg project which can take most of the credit for these improvements.

There are improvements in the demuxers and new supports (subtitles format rework with many new formats, Tivo2, OMA, MIDI support...).

Tag supports of audio files have vastly been improved(fix of APE, AAC, OGG tags,...)

This version also supports DVB windows devices (BDA), iSight Webcams, v4l2 on Linux and many other ones.
Filters

Many new audio and video filters have been added:

* New video filters like puzzle game, color extracting, sharpen, logo erasing, blue-screen and more have been added.
* New audio filters have introduced Replay Gain support, Faster/Slower audio playback with pitch correction and a spatializer.

Most video filters can now be streamed.
Developers

* libVLC has been rewritten and split and supports externally built plugins
* VLCKit, a Mac OS X Framework, enables external developers to develop applications around VLC.
* New bindings can be found on the wiki and the forums

Misc

A new update system, more secured, was developed for this release.

New localizations in Finnish, Persian, Polish, Punjabi, Bulgarian have joined the old ones.

Meh... It's still VLC. I don't understand why anyone would use it when there's Plex.

Sweet. Thank you for the heads up!

Plex is really kick-@$$. I have several Blu-Ray rips in all the codecs (h.264, MPEG-2, VC-1/True-HD, DTS-HD, DD and DTS) and my 2 gHz Mac Mini plays them all with Plex and without any dropped frames or audio issues. These m2ts files are around 30 mbps bit rates and VLC simply chokes on them. Plex even transcodes True-HD and DTS-HD audio down to DD or DTS on the fly so that if you have an optical receiver that can only decode those two formats, you still get digital surround sound (good for me; my Onkyo only does DD and DTS 5.1 surround). Front Row and VLC are gone from my computers, that's for sure.