Raspbian 2018-11-13 Brings Hardware-Accelerated VLC Media Player

After releasing the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ yesterday, the Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced Raspbian 2018-11-13 as the latest update to their Debian-based Linux distribution for these low-cost ARM SBCs.

Most notable with the Raspbian November 2018 update is shipping VLC as its default media player application. The VLC build in Raspbian comes with working hardware acceleration using Broadcom's VideoCore engine for H.264 / MPEG-2 / VC-1 video formats. But the MPEG-2 and VC-1 support requires purchasing the codec licenses.

This Raspbian operating system update also comes with Thonny 3 as a user-friendly integrated development environment for Python programming, and desktop configuration improvements and a new appearance settings.

Raspbian is now spun in a minimal install image as well as a "Raspbian Full" image depending upon your preference for how many extra applications are bundled with the OS image. The minimal image still includes their LXDE-based desktop and some applications like Chromium and VLC.

More details on the new Raspbian operating system release via RaspberryPi.org.