So, this is going to be the major release in a couple of weeks, but I'm going to share some stuff that should fit better the audience here on HN, and that are not part of the main announcement :)

First, this is a release that fixes some important architecture mistakes we've done in 2.0.x branch of VLC. I'm notably speaking of the lag in reactivity, notably on volume change (that was shared on the mpv thread) and seeking, but also some grave video settings propagation. I wish we could have fixed and shipped that earlier, but we couldn't (long release cycle).

Then, this is the first official release of libVLC that is LGPL for most of what you need as a developer, including the right modules. SDKs for Win32/64, MacOSX, iOS and Android are getting ready.

If you are a web developer, our VLC plugin now supports Windowless, to fill the gap between Flash and HTML5 (it should work on IE6,7,8 without too much work).

If you are on Mac OS, the interface is finally polished after the major changes of 2.0.0 :)

Finally, we decided, as a community that we will accelerate the major release cycle of VLC. The fact that we needed 1,5 year to get the fix to some critical audio core and video settings issues out is way too much. We will move towards a 6-months schedule with LTS.

Sure, there are other very good players on each platform, but we are doing our best so that you can play everything everywhere for free :)

As someone who embeds VLC via vlcj, I'd like to say thanks for your hard work.

Also thanks for the license change, much appreciated. The gluecode of vlcj is still gpl3 but I can re-write those

I saw you mentioned seeking within a file. Will seeking to positions close to the end of a media file be better now ?

My player has a tough time under VLC 2.0 seeking to within 30s of the end of the file.

It should be faster. What is the format?

WMV

congratulations on the new release. the changes are welcome :) but i can't find the setting to change the ui language, where is it?

"For developers, libVLC and most libVLC modules are now licensed under the LGPL" - interesting, is there a full list somewhere of which modules are/are not?

Yes. The list will be ready for the final release. But mostly DVD input, streaming output and visualizations (the later 2 will be LGPL in 2.2.0).