I was not a big fan of VLC. It felt a bit slow and it did not seem to render as smothly as MPC.

Now that with the latest release of VLC that has truly changed. VLC 1.1.0 meets all my expectations. They did an excelent job with the GPU and DSP decoding.

Here is the developers log from GIT: http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc/vlc-1.1.git;a=tag;h=1.1.0

VLC 1.1.0 - ‘The Luggage’
The first release of the 1.1.x branch of VLC

This is a major release, adding major features, notably:
- GPU and DSP decoding on selected platforms
- New support for codecs, demuxers and muxers
- Lua extensions and Lua content extensions (luaSD)
- Improved interfaces
- Video Output rework
- Removal of lots of modules, rewrite of many
- Improved performances, in CPU, RAM and I/O
- New libVLC and bindings
- New or improved ports on misc platforms
And so many bugs and other features…