3D Sound Labs HRTF technology for 3D Audio rendering to be integrated in the upcoming VLC 3.0 media player

3D Sound Labs, the 3D/VR Audio specialist, and VideoLAN, the editor of the world's renowned VLC media player today jointly announced their collaboration to bring world-class experience to 360° video and 3D audio content in the upcoming version of VLC.

The release 3.0 of VLC introduces 360° video and high-quality 3D Audio rendering. It supports multichannel and well as ambisonics audio content up to 3rd order ambisonics.

As part of this partnership, 3D Sound Labs will be providing a custom set of HRTF - Head-Related Transfer Function, the acoustics filters allowing a spatial audio experience over headphones - that has been optimized for the rendering algorithms used in VLC media player.

"We're glad to be working with 3D Sound Labs. The expertise of the team helped us fix many bugs and improve the audio quality for 360° content within the constraints of our open-source environment," said Jean-Baptiste Kempf, President of VideoLAN. "VLC 3.0 is a major release with plenty of new features," he added. "Since we're preparing for VR content, we needed to provide a perfect 3D Audio experience to our users."

VLC 3.0 is to be released in the coming days. For any 3D Audio enabled content, it will use by default the HRTF developed by 3D Sound Labs.

"We are proud to be contributing to the new release of VLC;" said Dimitri Singer, CEO at 3D Sound Labs. "With an install base of more than 300 million copies, this is a major deployment of our technology. In fact, with this release VLC will become de-facto the most deployed open media player for 3D Audio-enabled 360° content."

Further to the delivery of a standard HRTF specifically optimized for VLC media player, 3D Sound Labs also plans to release a proprietary VLC plugin. This plugin will embed VR Audio Kit the company's Ambisonics-based rendering engine. It will also allow switching to different HRTFs, and in particular using 3D Sound Labs' personalized HRTF, tuned to the listener's morphology for an even better, more realistic and immersive experience.

About VLC 3.0 

VLC 3.0, named "WeatherWax" is a major release changing a lot in the media engine of VLC. Notably, it:

• activates hardware decoding on all platforms, of H.264 & H.265, 8 & 10bits, allowing 4K60 or even 8K decoding with little CPU consumption;
• merges all the code from the mobile ports into the same release,
• supports 360 video and 3D audio, and prepares for VR content,
• supports direct HDR and HDR tone-mapping,
• updates the audio passthrough for HD Audio codecs,
• allows browsing of local network drives like SMB, FTP, SFTP, NFS
• stores the passwords securely
• brings a new subtitle rendering engine, supporting ComplexTextLayout and font fallback
• supports ChromeCast with the new renderer framework,
• adds support for numerous new formats and codecs, including WebVTT, AV1, TTML, HQX, 708 and Cineform,
• updates the macOS interface with major cleaning,
• support HiDPI UI on Windows,
• prepares the support for Wayland on Linux, and switches to OpenGL.

And so many other things

About VideoLAN 

VideoLAN is a non-profit organization, run by volunteers, that supports the development of free and open source multimedia solutions. Its most famous distributed software, the  VLC media player, is completely free and also one of the most used programs in the world. The application is free of advertisements, spyware, bloatware and other misfeatures that could be deceptive to its users.

Visit  http://www.videolan.org.

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About 3D Sound Labs 

3D Sound Labs is a French VR Audio technology company founded in January 2014 by entrepreneur Dimitri Singer, consumer electronics specialist Xavier Bonjour and Centrale-Supelec research engineer Renaud Séguier. 3D Sound Labs develops 3D/VR Audio software technologies as well as hardware (3D Audio headphones and motion tracking modules) to enable immersive and realistic experience of spatial sound over headphones thanks to its HRTF-based Ambisonics binaural engine.

The company created the world's first Smart 3D Audio Headphones and also provides a SDK and a freemium technology licensing program for third parties.

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