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home-hobbies in Home & Hobbies Channel,
Written by: Mohamed Hamdouni on Mar 29 2010, 4:47pm

Read all videos without installing tons of codecs

Windows Media Player and iTunes are the most popular media players available for home computing, but the VLC media player is one of the best media players and it's FREE. 

The VLC media player has a simple design, but the program is so powerful. 

This is one of the most advanced video players and is essential for anyone who plays or edits videos using a computer.

The U.I. (User Interface):

VLC media player looks like a small VCR panel,, there is a time-line track bar, a volume bar, navigation buttons and a button to toggle to the full-screen view. The program also has a menu bar featuring "Audio," "Video" and "Playback" options. 

Customized wallpapers can also be installed that allow the VLC player to change its look and feel.

image


Features:

The VLC Media Player, does exactly what it says, plays media files :)

While you'll use it mainly used for videos, the program plays almost any audio file as well as playlists of a mix of both (video and Audio). The program can also capture video on your desktop for tutorial videos or reviews for Softcity. The program also recognizes connected firewire devices and can stream live video streams through any firewire port on the computer.

THE main benefit of VLC is its ability to play almost all video files. For example, while downloading - legally - video files, most of the time you can't check whether you are dealing with a real or a fake file, so here is VLC, it will allow you to read any portion of the video file while downloading. 

 

Where to catch it?

The free program can be downloaded from VLC official website. The program is also adaptable to multiple computers, it's compatible with multiple operating systems and can be booted on any jump drive.

VLC media player can read the most popular formats as AVI, MPEG, MPEG4, FLV, MOV, WMV, AIFF, VOB,  OGG and more (It will be to long to list all formats) moreover it has great DVD playback abilities (read DVDs from any country).

To be tested and I'm sure it will be adopted ;)

Citizens Comments

Pierre VEBER says:

Definitely a great player! You can also check kmplayer which also read pretty all media formats but has a coolest UI (in my opinion). Don't need no bloatware to read videos and music!!

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Mar 30 2010, 12:40am | Report

Xavier BILLARD says:

It is the best player to see your video. I use it since few years without install several codec packs. And there are often update and is FREE!!! 

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Mar 30 2010, 6:19am | Report

Nacim TAMINE says:

Not to mention the encoding capabilities in addition to to all broadcast features, simply fantastic.

For advanced users, I also recommend foobar2000 ! looks small but with great capabilities (but what a crappy name!).

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Mar 31 2010, 3:34am | Report

Keith Taber says:

I like free, there are so many media codec out there that it is a nightmare trying to keep up with all, this seems to be a great solution to make sure that you can see the content that you want to see rather then chasing around the net looking for the right codec which takes longer then the videos play time only to find that the content wasn't worth the effort!

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Apr 1 2010, 3:45am | Report

Jeremy Yeatman says:

I use VLC and also MPlayer.

It's very convenient that there are "portable" versions of both to carry around on your USB memory stick. The ability to open ISO images is also very useful.

I also foobar2000 for audio. The native support for FLAC is good.

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Apr 1 2010, 5:45am | Report

Tim Browning says:

MPlayer is my 'tool of choice' for video playback. VLC is good for correcting aspect ratio when movies have been encoded incorrectly.

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Apr 1 2010, 8:04am | Report

Huzaifa Mogri says:

VLC is definitely my "go to" media player.  Especially since certain codecs have problems with Windows 7's media player.

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Apr 6 2010, 12:41pm | Report

Damien Edwards says:

Im going to have to give it a try.

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Apr 6 2010, 1:04pm | Report

Jake Burhenn says:

VLC is a great standalone player.  Another good, free option for those with a HTPC is MediaPortal, an open source replacement for Windows Media Center.

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Apr 6 2010, 4:24pm | Report

Azziz Mimouni says:

Can also be user as a home video server by streaming all input videos through a video card, video stream can be broadcasted using the rtsp stream protocol.

Definitely a must have software.

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Apr 16 2010, 8:19am | Report

Neil Crosby says:

Very good player, actually run this on my office pc.

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Apr 19 2010, 2:50pm | Report

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About the Author

Mohamed Hamdouni

Paris, Ile-de-France, FR

225 contributions

I wanna be the 1st Human/Google hybrid (I mean by this that I want to learn and store on my brain as many things as I can from every domains and cultures)

Regarding my computer skills, instead of "I'm a computer" I would say "I'm an Android"

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