VLC media player plays everything – everywhere
VLC media player is a free cross-platform media player which supports large number of multimedia formats without need of installing additional codec and tools. VLC media player can be used for streaming server with many extended features like on-fly transcoding, video on demand, stream server in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network, etc.
Audio and Video formats supported of VLC media player are Suported video formats are MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc.
VLC Media player as free cross-platform project can be installed and run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS and other operating systems. More information about installing VLC Media player on your OS read here.
VLC Media player is part of VideoLAN project, which produces free and open source software for video, released under the GNU General Public License.
Other features of VLC Media player:
- DVD decryption is done through the libdvdcss library.
- VLC on GNU/Linux, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows has playback control support via libcdio and libvcdinfo. On other platforms, SVCD support varies depending on the availability of these libraries. (Volunteers for adding support are always welcome.). Handling still frames (often used in menus) and switching between different video formats is problematic.
- VLC for GNU/Linux supports two kinds of MPEG-2 encoding cards: Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250/350 and Visiontech Kfir.
- WMV-3 / WMV-9 / VC-1 playback is provided through the FFmpeg-library starting with VLC 0.8.6.
- Windows DMO codecs can be used by VLC on 32-bit x86 platforms and allow WMV-3/WMA-3 decoding. This feature is untested on Intel-based Macs.
- VLC’s 0.9.0 release will introduce support for RV30 and RV40 based upon the additions to the FFmpeg-library by one their Google Summer of Code 2007 projects.
- Full color for YUV-type chromas is not handled, only the gray-scale value. Subtitle transparency is not fully supported for all chromas. Some chromas are not handled at all.
- The Quartz module is available on PowerPC-based Macs only.
- Windows DMO codecs can be used by VLC on 32-bit x86 platforms and allow WMV-3/WMA-3 decoding. This feature is untested on Intel-based Macs.
- Real Audio playback is provided through the FFmpeg-library which does only support a limited number of RA derivatives.
- A new Qt4 interface is to-be-introduced by VLC’s 0.9.0 release. It is already enabled in the nightly builds with limited functionality.
- CD-Text information provided via libcdio. This service is available on all platforms supported by the library.
- Depending on the operating system’s support.
- Supported CPU extensions are MMX, MMXEXT, SSE, SSE2 and 3D Now! on x86 processors, and AltiVec on G4/G5 processors.
- The OpenBSD 2.9 default assembler does not support MMX.
Download link: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Tags | Multimedia, Music, Reviews, Software, Video, Video Codec
Yes, one of my favorites. Even hear that it can be put on a thumb-drive (self-contained); but, haven’t gotten it to work that way. Ouch! Didn’t work right on Vista
Videos froze. Blue screen. I’ve switched to AlShow. Does much the same but RESIZES videos / resolution when in full screen (VLC would keep the same resolution and some videos would look smaller on the screen). I’m looking for the BEST video player. Haven’t found it. Or, waiting for VLC to address the Vista problem. Till then: AlTools.