One of my favorite words in the English language for its meaning is free. Being a computer junkie, another of my favorite words is ware, combine them both and the world is a better place. I have found a few lately that are above and beyond the standards, applications that exceed the level of commercial software in terms of function being written by dedicated people who want to practice their skills for themselves and then share it with others.
Today, let me tell you about VLC Media Player. Quite simply, uninstall all the other video players on your system, and download it. You can find it at VideoLan.org. It is the very best of the best in terms of speed, options,and presetup codecs. Have I mentioned that it is available for Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Debian GNU/Linux, Mandrake Linux, Fedora Core, Familiar Linux, YOPY/Linupy, Zaurus, SuSE Linux, Red Hat Linux and WinCE / PocketPC. Oh yeah if you want to download the source code and compile it yourself it is also available for NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, QNX, Gentoo Linux, and Crux Linux.
19 supported Operating Systems, to quote one of the few really funny Adam Sandler lines, is “Not too shabby”. The features can be found at VLC Features. An 8MB download for a video player may seem large (unless you consider the bloated MS player) but considering the insane amount of file types this app supports it is actually small. I have yet to find any video files that this did not support, and you can add the one or two codecs it does not have rather easily at their webpage, there is decent documentation and the entire app feels “right”. This is before we even begin to cover the fact that it does handle streams, can act as a streaming server, and does it all with a handy and useful wizard for the newbie.
In terms of installation, usage, documentation and functionality I give this little app a 91% rating. When I read through the comments on some of the open source sites about it, all the complaints I can find are from people who cannot read help files, or those who think AOL is the internet. The quick description would be
VideoLAN Client (VLC) is a media player for Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, QNX, and PocketPC. It can play most audio and video codecs (MPEG 1/2/4, DivX, WMV, Vorbis, AC3, AAC, etc.), has support for VCD, SVCD, and DVD (with menus), and can read or dump streams from a network source (HTTP, UDP, DVB, MMS, etc.). It can also act as a server and send streams through the network, with optional support for audio and video transcoding.
-Michael Reed