How many is a 1 billion? In the case of VideoLAN.org’s hugely popular plays-almost-any-codec, open-source VLC Media Player, that’s how many downloads they have served since 2005, but nowhere close to the total delivered since 1996, when the app first shipped. A big part of the popularity of this app is regular tweaking and today’s release, though a mere point update, comes to market with scores of changes, features and fixes baked in.

Though rumors about the imminent release of VLC Media Player 2.0.2 (blog) have been bouncing around the web for about week, it’s now official. As alluded to in the lead, there is a metric butt tonne of new stuff.

“VLC 2.0.2 adds further refinements to the new Mac interface,” writes VideoLAN’s Felix Kühne. “We improved the video playback experience by enhancing the crop features and restoring the highly desired ‘go automatically to fullscreen’ feature.”

Kühne continues, “Additionally, the aspect ratio is respected like in the 1.1.x releases. The Retina Display (HiDPI) on the new MacBook Pro is natively supported, too.”

Other new features include drag n’ drop between a playlist, services and your media library, as well as Growl 1.3 support. Gone is the annoying pop up window asking users to be patient while VLC updates the font cache.

Also, owners of older Macs, especially legacy PowerPC models, will be happy to know that support for ATI Radeon, 7500, 9200 and nVidia GeForce 5200 graphics has been greatly improved. Ditto that for Intel Macs equipped with GMA 950 graphics.

For the full list of changes, click the above link and be prepared to read. As of this writing, download links weren’t available, but look for those over the coming hours.

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