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If you want to play video or musicfiles in just about any format, VLC media player is probably your answer.
VLC media player is the most successful free open source multimedia player out there with over 500 million downloads according to the developers. In particular, VLC media player is a great alternative to Windows Media Player, iTunes, and RealPlayer. It's lightweight, fast, easy to use and most importantly, plays almost anything.
It's been two and a half years since version 1.0 was released and version 2 ("Twoflower") brings a new interface, faster decoding, support for more formats and the ability to play HD and BluRay. It still remains however the most stable, flexible and lightweight audio and video player around today. While other media players will play unusual formats after downloading a codec, or simply refuse to play things, VLC media player handles tons of formats, from MPEG to FLV and RMBV files. Version 2 has seen some important additions too such as support for 10 bit codes plus multi-threaded decoding for H.264, MPEG-4/Xvid and WebM.
Also useful is the fact that you can use VLC media player to preview files you are downloading since it plays incomplete parts of video files. VLC media player is not just for video playback however. It also offers superb integration with video channel streaming services such as Channels.com giving you access to channels such as ESPN, Reuters and National Geographic. Just right-click or CMD-click on the playlist, select Services Discovery and Channels.com. Channels.com will then appear in your VLC media player playlist. Click on it to reveal the the different categories of channels available. Click on the category you want and a drop down list of all available channels appears in VLC media player. Just click on the channel you want to watch and streaming should begin almost immediately.
VLC media player also has great hotkey support and if you take the time to learn the shortcuts so it can be controlled without touching your mouse. If you're watching DVDs or video files through it, this is not an issue. For music, it plays more or less any file and features an equalizer and playlist creation. VLC media player isn't as intuitive as iTunes as a media manager, but it's a much more flexible player in terms of file formats. You can even use VLC to convert your files, and on top of all the formats and physical media it will play, many streaming protocols and TV capture cards are supported.
VLC media player makes it easy to add subtitles to your video files too - just add the SRT file to the folder where your video is kept, and it will automatically play with subtitles.
Finally, the interface has been somewhat improved in version 2 although it remains strictly functional. However, you can download skins to completely change VLC media player's appearance. The preferences menu is comprehensive without being overwhelming, and there is extensive documentation online.
VLC Media Player is quite simply the best multimedia application for Windows and Mac. It plays just about anything, hassle free - what more could you need?
Recent changes
- With faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs, 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC
- Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos
- It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental)
- Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use
- Twoflower fixes several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers
- Version 2.0.5:
- Rework and fixes of the Mac OS X interface
- Fix Pulseaudio initial synchronization
- Fix MKV, SWF, AIFF and subtitles demuxer crashes
- Translations updates and new Welsh translation
- DVB-S delivery system detection
- Fix audio and video track selection through libVLC
- Fix system sleep issue on Mac OS X 10.5
VLC media player supports the following formats
MKV, WMV, MPEG, MP4, MOV, AVI, DIVX, XVID, FLV, FLAC, WAV, REAL, VOB plus many more
