f you want to play
video or
music files 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.
VLC media player supports the following formats
MKV, WMV, MPEG, MP4, MOV, AVI, DIVX, XVID, FLV, FLAC, WAV, REAL, VOB plus many more