VLC 1.1 gets extension support

That panel above might not look familiar to current VLC users, and there's a good reason for that. It's because the Last.FM Context Panel is from an extension -- something which is all-new for VLC version 1.1.

Jean-Philippe Andre announced the news this weekend, noting that they're different than the modules developers have been able to create for previous versions. Extensions will be created using "Lua, a simple a lightweight scripting language, embedded inside VLC media player."

The goal is to provide Firefox-like extensibility in VLC, allowing each of us to personalize our media player with a wide range of additional functionality. Currently there are a handful extensions you can demo, including Last.fm and IMDB lookups and subtitle/lyric display.

Don't start getting excited just yet. Based on how long it took for VLC to hit v1.0, it could be quite a while before a stable download of 1.1 is made available. Anxious testers can grab a nightly build from http://nightlies.videolan.org.

[via webupd8]