VLC Media Player
This player started life as the cross-platform client for the VideoLAN open source video streaming server solution. Since then it has matured into the versatile player of choice for almost everyone. This robust, never-say-die player plays just about anything you throw at it. Sometimes, though, the video is a little garbled, but there is some video output - not just visualisations as in Windows Media Player.
All players - such as Real Alternative, Quick Time Alternative and Windows Media Player - would play your files if you loaded the necessary codecs; VLC, however, requires no codecs to be installed. It comes loaded with almost all of them, and with something or the other to decompress whatever you decide you want it to play. This doesn’t mean that the player is bulky: at 7 MB, it’s one of the smaller players! All this sounds good, but the best part is, the player is open-sourced under the GPL, so it’s available for a number of OSes in addition to Windows such as different Linux distributions, Mac OS and BSD.
The player offers a one-stop solution, supporting playback of a whole slew of file types, including MPEG2, MPEG1, MPEG4 (XVid, DivX, 3ivx and libavcodec codecs), DV25 (25Mb Digital Video) and even, to a limited extent, WMV files, where it plays the start of the video and then gives up. In addition to these it serves its original function as a streaming-media server.
Firefox now has a plug-in for VLC that can be installed to play streaming media content from the Internet. Open source means the program gets updated very frequently; having to download the updates constantly can be an irritant!
The player has a number of features, such as widescreen viewing which makes watching DVDs a real pleasure. The latest version (VLC 0.8.2), supports DTS sound as well, so you can plug in 5.1 -channel speakers to your system and create a theatre of your own.
One irritant is the error messages that keep popping up in the middle of the screen when frames are skipped. However, this is the default setting, and can be disabled. The other sour note is the limited capacity to play .wmv and .3gp files.
If you are looking for a one-stop media playing solution, and if you have a large number of media files in varied formats, VLC is "the only player you would ever need," as Download.com says.
All players - such as Real Alternative, Quick Time Alternative and Windows Media Player - would play your files if you loaded the necessary codecs; VLC, however, requires no codecs to be installed. It comes loaded with almost all of them, and with something or the other to decompress whatever you decide you want it to play. This doesn’t mean that the player is bulky: at 7 MB, it’s one of the smaller players! All this sounds good, but the best part is, the player is open-sourced under the GPL, so it’s available for a number of OSes in addition to Windows such as different Linux distributions, Mac OS and BSD.
The player offers a one-stop solution, supporting playback of a whole slew of file types, including MPEG2, MPEG1, MPEG4 (XVid, DivX, 3ivx and libavcodec codecs), DV25 (25Mb Digital Video) and even, to a limited extent, WMV files, where it plays the start of the video and then gives up. In addition to these it serves its original function as a streaming-media server.
Firefox now has a plug-in for VLC that can be installed to play streaming media content from the Internet. Open source means the program gets updated very frequently; having to download the updates constantly can be an irritant!
The player has a number of features, such as widescreen viewing which makes watching DVDs a real pleasure. The latest version (VLC 0.8.2), supports DTS sound as well, so you can plug in 5.1 -channel speakers to your system and create a theatre of your own.
One irritant is the error messages that keep popping up in the middle of the screen when frames are skipped. However, this is the default setting, and can be disabled. The other sour note is the limited capacity to play .wmv and .3gp files.
If you are looking for a one-stop media playing solution, and if you have a large number of media files in varied formats, VLC is "the only player you would ever need," as Download.com says.
Labels: Software
posted by Asapcorp at
12:57
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