Playback:
* Instant pausing
* Frame-By-Frame Support
* Timeshift support
* RTSP trickplay support
* On-the-fly record

Access:
* RTSP authentication with Darwin Streaming Server
* On-the-fly gzip and bzip2 file decompression (except on Windows)
* Playback for video in Rar archives
* DVB-S and ATSC 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.

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

Decoders:
* AES3 (SMPTE 302M) support
* Dolby Digital Plus - E-AC-3 (A/52b)  support
* True HD/MLP support
* Blu-Ray Linear PCM support
* QCELP (Qualcomm PureVoice) support
* Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 support

Demuxers:
* Support for Dirac and RealVideo in Matroska files
* Major improvements in RealMedia files (.rm and .rmvb)

Encoders:
* Dirac encoding support using libdirac (supported in Ogg and in TS)

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.

Linux/Windows interface:
* Recently played items list

Mac OS X Interface:
* Reveal-in-Finder functionality for locally stored items.

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.

Playlist:
* support to Export the playlist in HTML
* Lua script for BBC radio playback

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

Video output:
* Effects (cube, torus, etc.) removed from OpenGL video output

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

have you tried it dude? 0.9.8a is kinda problematic sometimes halfway through a movie will stall and auto shut