VideoLan says it will soon release a major 2.0 release of its open source VLC media player, which will contain many new features of interest to OS X users. The new VLC will support Blu-ray playback, if you have the proper hardware, a full screen mode in Lion, and a new interface that looks similar to iTunes.

The 2.0 version is currently available as a release candidate, but it may, of course, still have some unsquashed bugs.

Steve Jobs was famously against building Blu-ray support into the Mac, calling licensing issues a "bag of hurt." The Mac does support internal and external Blu-ray drives for data storage. With the VLC software, those drives should be able to play Blu-ray movies.

There have been some 3rd party Blu-ray software solutions, but this will be free, and we hope, reliable.

[via MacStories]

Open source media player VLC to get complete rewrite and Blu-ray playback originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.