Playback:
* Instantaneous pausing
* Frame-by-Frame playback
* Finer speed control
* On-the-fly recording for all medias
* Timeshift for most medias
* RTSP trickplay support
* Subtitles core improvements and fixes

Decoders:
* New AES3 (SMPTE 302M) decoder
* New Dolby Digital Plus - E-AC-3 (A/52b) decoder
* New True HD/MLP decoder and parser
* New Blu-Ray Linear PCM decoder
* New QCELP (Qualcomm PureVoice) decoder
* Improved Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 decoder
* New WMA v1/2 fixed point integer decoder
* Close Caption under SCTE-20 standard are now correctly decoded
* Improvement of WavPack decoder to support all integer modes and float mode
* Corrections on 5.1 and 7.1 channel decoding and ordering

Demuxers:
* Support for Dirac, MLP and RealVideo in Matroska files
* Major improvements in RealMedia files opening (.rm and .rmvb)
* Improvements of the TS demuxer for M2TS files from Blu-Ray and AVCHD
* Metadata for mod files are supported
* GSM codecs in Wav files are supported
* New raw audio demuxer supporting raw PCM streams
* New dirac demuxer for raw dirac streams

Encoders:
* Dirac encoding using libdirac (supported in Ogg and in TS)
* Shine mp3 fixed-point encoder

Access:
* RTSP authentication with Darwin Streaming Server
* On-the-fly gzip and bzip2 file decompression (except on Windows)
* Playback for video in uncompressed multi-RAR archives
* DVB-S and ATSC cards support on Windows
* New OSS and Alsa accesses. The v4l2 and v4l modules no longer support
OSS or Alsa audio input. Use --input-slave alsa:// or oss:// if needed.
* DVB scanning on linux
* EXPERIMENTAL Blu-Ray Disc and AVCHD Folders support
* On-the-fly zip file decompression and browsing (MRL of the form zip://file.zip|file.avi to specify the file)
* Opening of any file descriptor using 'fd://'
* MTP device access on Unix
* CD-Text support on the cdda module (CD-Audio)
* :start-time and :stop-time can handle sub-second values

Inputs:
* Mouse cursor support in x11 and win32 screen modules
* Screen module now features partial screen capture and mouse following on
Windows.

Playlist:
* Export the playlist in HTML
* Lua script for BBC radio playback
* Better metadata handling and reading

Linux/Windows interface:
* Global Hotkeys on Windows and Linux
* Various fixes for skins2 interface
* Recently played items list
* Interface toolbar customizations
* Various Improvements on the Qt interface:
- More menus actions
- Finer speed slider
- Improvements on many dialogs
- New dialog for plugins listing
- Fixed-size mode for videos
- Better teletext, trickplay and encrypted streams control
* Better integration in GTK environments

Mac OS X Interface:
* Controllable by the Media Keys on modern Apple keyboards (brushed Aluminium)
* Reveal-in-Finder functionality for locally stored items.
* Easy addition of Subtitles through the Video menu
* Additional usability improvements

Stream output:
* Restored the old mpeg2 transrating module.
* Multiple bridge-in instances are now possible.
* bridge-in can be used to configure a placeholder stream.
* Remote Audio Output Protocol (AirTunes) module.
* Fixed mosaic memleak. Mosaics are now usable again.

Maemo Port:
* New Maemo port with:
- an interface based on Hildon framework.
- scaler based on the swscale_nokia770 library.

Windows CE Port:
EXPERIMENTAL work for the winCE port has been done.

Mac OS X Port:
* Support for Mac OS X 10.4.x was dropped due to its technical limitations
* Speed improvements by using llvm-gcc

Audio output:
* Removed obsolete Esound and aRts plugins
* Surround support for PulseAudio

Video output:
* Effects (cube, torus, etc.) removed from OpenGL video output
* Video is able to stay in original size and to zoom in fullscreen
(hotkey 'o') while keeping black borders
* Image video output has been rewritten into a video-filter named 'scene'.
The old image video output has been removed.
* Support for scaling and converting video chromas with FFMPEG imgresample was
withdrawn due to bugs. Please use the newer FFMPEG swscale instead.

Miscellanous:
* Invmem, a fake codec to display images from external applications