If you want to play video or music files in just about any format, VLC media player is probably your answer. VLC media player is the most successful free open source multimedia player out there with over 500 million downloads according to the developers. In particular, VLC media player is a great alternative to , iTunes, and RealPlayer. It's lightweight, fast, easy to use and most importantly, plays almost anything.
Still the most powerful free media player
It was two and a half years since version 1.0 was released before version 2 ("Twoflower") brought a new interface, faster decoding and support for more formats and the ability to play HD and BluRay. It still remains however the most stable, flexible and lightweight audio and video player around today. While other media players will play unusual formats after downloading a codec, or simply refuse to play things, VLC media player handles tons of formats, from MPEG to FLV and RMBV files. Version 2 has seen some important additions too such as support for 10 bit codes plus multi-threaded decoding for H.264, MPEG-4/Xvid and WebM.
Also useful is the fact that you can use VLC media player to preview files you are downloading since it plays incomplete parts of video files. VLC media player is not just for video playback however. It also offers superb integration with video channel streaming services such as Channels.com giving you access to channels such as ESPN, Reuters and National Geographic. Just right-click or CMD-click on the playlist, select Services Discovery and Channels.com. Channels.com will then appear in your VLC media player playlist. Click on it to reveal the the different categories of channels available. Click on the category you want and a drop down list of all available channels appears in VLC media player. Just click on the channel you want to watch and streaming should begin almost immediately.
Easy to control and create playlists
VLC media player also has great hotkey support and if you take the time to learn the shortcuts so it can be controlled without touching your mouse. If you're watching DVDs or video files through it, this is not an issue. For music, it plays more or less any file and features an equalizer and playlist creation. VLC media player isn't as intuitive as iTunes as a media manager, but it's a much more flexible player in terms of file formats. You can even use VLC to convert your files, and on top of all the formats and physical media it will play, many streaming protocols and TV capture cards are supported.
VLC media player makes it easy to add subtitles to your video files too - just add the SRT file to the folder where your video is kept, and it will automatically play with subtitles.
Finally, the interface has been somewhat improved in version 2 on Mac. In fact, the Mac interface is now considerably slicker than on Windows with a single window for everything. However, it's only available in 2 colors: Lion grey and QTX black. There are also new extensions support and better Lion integration. The preferences menu is still comprehensive without being overwhelming, and there is extensive documentation online.
Don't forget to check out some of our articles such as VLC media player v KMPlayer, How to rotate a video with VLC media player, How to sync audio with video in VLC media player and How to use subtitles with VLC media player.
The ultimate free mutiformat media player
There's very little to fault with VLC media player. It's a superb lightweight media player that will successfully play the most stubborn files where other players fail.
Recent changes
- With faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs, 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC
- Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos
- It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental)
- Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use
- Twoflower fixes several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers
- Version 2.0.5:
- Rework and fixes of the Mac OS X interface
- Fix Pulseaudio initial synchronization
- Fix MKV, SWF, AIFF and subtitles demuxer crashes
- Translations updates and new Welsh translation
- DVB-S delivery system detection
- Fix audio and video track selection through libVLC
- Fix system sleep issue on Mac OS X 10.5
Notes
Note that versions of VLC media player compatible with Mac OS X 10.1 to 10.6 are available from the developer site. The main download link here is version 2 for the 64 bit Intel version compatible with OS X 10.5 and above. However, you can find VLC Player for OS X 10.4.11 Intel Macs here. There is not, and there will never be, a version of VLC media player for Mac OS 9 say the developers.
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