Features
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols without external codec or program.
It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
VLC can play:
- MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files from a hard disk, a CD-ROM drive, and so on
- DVDs, VCDs, and Audio CDs
- From satellite cards (DVB-S)
- Several types of network streams: UDP/RTP Unicast, UDP/RTP Multicast, HTTP, RTSP, MMS, etc.
- From acquisition or encoding cards (on GNU/Linux and Windows only)
To view the full features table, visit the VideoLAN VLC Features page at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html
VLC Media Player is a long-time open-source favorite, and the latest version is also the first to be out of beta development. It’s not the only option for free video playback, but it’s one of the best, and the feature updates in version 1 make it well worth the upgrade.
Users can now get frame-by-frame advancement, granular speed controls allowing for on-the-fly slower or faster playback, and live recording of streaming video. The toolbars are fully customizable, so you can have only the buttons you need in the interface, there’s AirTunes streaming, and there’s better integration in Gtk environments. Along with the improvements, VLC continues to offer robust support for a wide range of video and audio formats, including OGG, MP2, MP3, MP4, DivX, HD codecs like AES3, Raw Dirac, and even support for playing back zipped files. The default interface is still a stripped down player that belies VLC’s functionality and features. Skinning can fix that quickly, but behavior can still be a bit unpredictable depending on the quality of the skin. VLC’s open-source foundation and community ensures that it evolves quickly and often, with new features and fixes released frequently. Overall, VLC Media Player is a must-have application for its ability to open just about any type of video file you throw at it.
