After several years in development and nearly 60 million downloads it looks like our favorite media player is finally nearing 1.0 status. That’s right; the first release candidate for VLC media player 1.0 is now up for grabs, offering a peek of what we should expect from the finalized version. Codenamed Goldeneye, the latest version of this popular open-source player brings various playback and interface improvements along with new features and numerous bug fixes.

Overall it seems to be the same solid application capable of playing just about anything you throw at it, but a few of its highlights include instantaneous pausing, frame-by-frame playback, on-the-fly recording and finer speed control during playback. It also adds several new and improved decoders, demuxers, encoders, and other codec-related stuff. More details about the release can be found in the change log and download links for VLC 1.0 RC are currently available for Windows and Linux systems only.