87
VLC media player
Released February, 2001
The Pros:Supports lots of codecs. Does not use much memory and opens quickly. Available for Windows and Macintosh.
The Cons:Artifacts sometimes appear when skipping through some filetypes. Can't handle dynamic soft subtitles as well as some competitors. Can't select multiple objects and have them play in succession.
VLC media player is a free software media player by the VideoLAN project. It is a highly portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. VLC used to stand for "VideoLAN Client", but that meaning is deprecated. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Windows CE, and is widely used with over 50 million downloads for version 0.8.6.VLC uses a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries. Many of its codecs are provided by the libavcodec codec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses mainly its own muxer and demuxers. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library. Version 0.8.6, which adds support for WMV version 9 and enhances support for H.264, was released on 10 December 2006. The current version 1.0 was released on July 9th 2009.
User Reviews (44)
Pros & Cons
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42
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33
Does not use much memory and opens quickly
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24
Available for Windows and Macintosh
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19
Plays anything you throw at it from any source including local, disc, network, or Web
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14
Overrides regional restriction of dvd drives.
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14
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11
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11
Can be used to stream video to other network players
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9
Convert videos to your iPod or iPhone
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9
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8
Available for BSD and Linux, and Solaris.
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5
Can create playlists, select multiple objects and play them in succession.
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4
Works well on old computers
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4
Good playback video and sound quality
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4
Artifacts sometimes appear when skipping through some filetypes.
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1
Can't handle dynamic soft subtitles as well as some competitors.
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0
Can't select multiple objects and have them play in succession
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0
No support for hardware decoding like CUDA or DXVA
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-3
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-6
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Comments (3)
GT-D:
#vlc_media_player I liked it but it crashed on my system all the time... I've been using Media Player Classic as distributed in the CCCP package.
May 29, 08
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Howlsthunder:
#vlc_media_player VLC is the go-to all-in-one for all the many formats that don't run on Macs. The built-in codecs make viewing video a breeze. I literally don't use or need anything else. Old versions were a bit unstable but the current version seems to run okay.
Apr 16, 08
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helpful
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