The highlights of this release are native VC-1/WMV3, On2 VP5 and VP62 (used in some Flash video files) decoding, which works even on non-Intel platforms and SSA/ASS/color subtitles.

Furthermore MPlayer can now run natively on Intel Macs (you just have to pass --disable-loader --disable-mp3lib to configure), -endpos was finally added to MPlayer and the Windows GUI has seen a number of improvements.

Vorbis decoding has seen a big speedup, as has H.264. The optimizations to H.264 are still ongoing, but the difference should already be noticeable.

And last not least many bugs were found and fixed since pre8.

MPlayer 1.0rc1 will no longer load a file-specific configure file located in the same directory as the file you're playing, because of potential security concerns (thanks to Rudolf Polzer for pointing this out); if you want to restore the old behavior add -use-filedir-conf.

If you already have the binary codec package from pre8 you don't need to redownload it: The new 20061022 packages do not contain any new codecs, they just miss some that now work natively.

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