A company denying warranty service for laptop speaker damage if VLC Media Player or KMPlayer is found installed sounds ridicules, but that's exactly the case with DELL where users are being denied repair of blown speakers if the above popular media-players are found installed on their laptop. The company's argument is - "When using VLC media player, volume can be increased to max output. This eventually distorts the speaker output. If audio/video playback is continuously done using VLC with max volume (100%) over a period of time then even if the volume is kept at a lower level sound would be distorted. This distortion is permanent. ". But as put forward by VLC's main developer (and shared below), that the media-player simply uses Windows officially provided API's like every other media-player and the problem lies with the fact that DELL is using inferior quality, cheap components where their sound-card is outputting at max 10W, and the accompanied speakers can only take 6W causing the damage. Don't miss the VLC's main developer answer to DELL shared at Hacker News posted after the "read more" link below.

Free and open source, cross-platform multimedia player VLC Media Player got updated to v 1.1.0 introducing impressive new features like better support for HD video via GPU decoding, improved audio experience, faster decoding, lighter footprint, new add-ons and script framework for personalization and added support for WebM decoding and encoding. Full list of new changes with download links is available after the jump.

The first bugfix release version of the 0.9 VLC Media player series is out now for public downloading, unfortunately and surprisingly no Windows version is yet released for the latest build 0.9.3 citing lack of Windows developers contribution to the project, according to the official website with such a situation new versions of VLC media player for Windows might become less frequent and severely out of sync with the Linux and Mac OS X versions.

The old Windows version 0.9.2 is quite buggy on certain configurations and may display libvlc.dll errors as shown below before playing any media file.

Latest version of highly versatile and popular VLC Media Player v 0.9.2 is now available for downloading, the last version of the free open-source cross-platform media player was downloaded 95,056,974 times from the official website itself, the current version is getting downloaded at the rate of ~ 5.1 downloads/second.