From ProductWiki, free unbiased product reports for the consumer.

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 0.9.2 was released on September 15th, 2008.

Pros & Cons

Pros:
21 people have already voted. Do you agree?

•
Supports lots of codecs
+21agreedisagree

•
Does not use much memory and opens quickly
+17agreedisagree

•
Available for Windows and Macintosh
+12agreedisagree

•
Overrides regional restriction of dvd drives.
+4agreedisagree

•
Plays anything you throw at it from any source including local, disc, network, or Web
+2agreedisagree

•
Can be used to rip DVDs
+2agreedisagree

•
Convert videos to your iPod or iPhone
+2agreedisagree

•
Play ripped DVDs
+2agreedisagree

•
Can be used to stream video to other network players
+2agreedisagree

Cons:
Do you agree?

•
Can't select multiple objects and have them play in succession
+6agreedisagree

•
Full-screen interface
+3agreedisagree

Competing products

VLC media player is ranked 1st.  See the top picks in Media Software

Add a competitor to the list

Submit a link

3 comments about VLC media player

1.  avatar Howlsthunder  Apr 16, 2008 4:38pm

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.
2.  avatar rabidpotatochip  Apr 23, 2008 5:10pm

This program plays everything out of the box. What's not to love?
3.  avatar GT-D  May 29, 2008 10:32am

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.
Some HTML is allowed. Your comments remain editable after you post..

To do:

Some parts of the product report still need to be filled in. Adding infomation to any of these sections help make this product report more complete.

Related products

 

There aren't any products listed here yet.

Add a related product to this list

VLC media player

    Who else tapped it

    Howlsthunder

    love, have


     
    rabidpotatochip

    love, open source, have


     
    imanimpostor

    have, love


     
    hawks22gk

    love


     
    show more (18)

    Key Features:

    Manufacturer VideoLAN
    MSRP $0.00
    Release Date Feb. 1, 2001
    Software Type Media Player, Audio/Video

    Sponsors

    Product page stats

    936 views and 185 edits (see all)
    Created: 01/28/2008 - 12:51
    Modified: 09/16/2008 - 20:56