There are many media players in addition to the ubiquitous Windows Media or
Quicktime players. I use and often recommend VLC Player as a one-stop tool to play just
about any format.
In this video for an Ask Leo!
webinar, Iāll show off a few of its features.
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Transcript
VLC player. VLC player is a replacement or an alternative to Windows Media Player to basically a dozen other different media players. You can see that itās available here from videolan.org. Itās a free download; itās once again ādonation wareā ā if you feel like donating to the cause, you can.
VLCās single biggest claim to fame is that it can view almost any format that you might have on your machine. Iāve not yet found something that it canāt play. Iāve ended up making it the default media player on almost all of my machines.
To show VLC, Iāll show two different things. Iām going to show you first, videos. This particular video is a .3gp video that was taken on my phone basically at the same beach we were at for an earlier trip. The video quality (Iām not really sure how well GoToWebinar is going to play with this), but you can see that it plays the video just fine.
There are two issues in the video quality that you are probably seeing live and that would be GoToWebinarās not necessarily able to keep up with streaming video and second, coloration Iāve noticed here is just a little bit off and thatās because Iām actually doing this with a virtual machine and not on my desktop. Youāll have to trust me that when this actually plays on a real desktop, it actually looks really, really good. So thatās the videoā¦as Iāve said, Iāve yet to find a video format that Iāve not been able to throw at this thing and just have it work. Itās been very useful for that.
And Iāll also end up using it as my MP3 player. So Iāll just go ahead and pause Pink there for a moment. As an MP3 player, it does fine; it will do playlists; it will do everything that most of your other MP3 players will do (youāll see here that itās building up the playlist and showing you exactly what itās playing). Again, itās a very simple program that handles a large number of file formats. Once again, I think it can play almost any audio file you can conceive and think of. It may or may not be able to play Reel; Reel tends to be kind of funny that way, but it is a very useful and ubiquitous media player.
Itās not the prettiest thing in the world; Iāll absolutely admit that. Weāll fire this thing back up again. You can skin it; I typically donāt (I believe you can skin it) preferring to stick with the basic interface, but by and large, everything that you might want to do with a media player is in VideoLanās VLC player.
Can I answer any questions about VLC?
Does it contain all of the necessary codecs? To the best of my knowledge, yes, all of the statements Iāve just made about it playing everything that Iāve thrown at it, Iāve done with it just out of the box. Iāve not needed to download any additional codecs. The only caveat that Iāll throw out there is that it is possible that it relies on some of the codecs that may already installed on my system but I donāt believe thatās necessarily true. Iāll also point out that VLC is, in fact, multi-platform. VLC is available for the Mac and also on Linux.
What would happen if you added āk-lite pacā? Honestly, Iām not sure; a) Iām not sure that you need to, but b) Iām fairly certain that once again, it will just work.
Can you use it to record? I donāt believe so. Itās fundamentally a player so its focus is playing media, not necessarily recording it. Typically for recording audio, I recommend tools like Audacity if youāre trying to do audio or if youāre trying to do video, any of a number of different video applications, depending on the function that youāre attempting to perform.
My only complaint, and itās a minor one, is that it wonāt play well with Firefox and completely take over media playing duties so that I donāt have to have Quicktime installed. I donāt like Quicktime because it tries to take over media playing and I havenāt trusted Apple since they tried to make Safari my default browser when I didnāt even know they had installed it. I know, Iām an unforgiving sort.
Hopefully HTML 5 will fix it so that this will no longer be a problem but it could be that I am just dreaming.
Come on .. VLC is nowhere near good , itās buggy and slow and its development pace is just dead, the only advantage that player has is being cross-platform.
For me using codecs ā though complicated ā is the best all round solution , youāve got system wide support for foreign files like MKV , RMVB and FLV with thumbnails and everything.
I really like the combination of Shark007 Codecs + KMPlayer , they are free and they do the job perfectly .
I believe itās called K-Lite Codec Pack and it does indeed work just fine; Iāve got both installed and even both running (well, the Windows Media Player Classic that comes with K-Lite) and there are no conflicts.
VLC does record video very nicely, I use for that purpose often. Have not tried recording audio.
Iām kind of split here.. As much as I want to praise VLC for being a decent free multi-video player, crazy as it sounds, WMP actually will play a DVD without any staggering unlike VLC on a clean install on Windows7. I have tried this on multiple OS installations, and for some reason VLC doesnāt have a smooth DVD playback like WMP (Windows Media Player).
I, however, still support VLC over WMP due to my history with WMP being lame and stealing other player codecs over the years just to play certain videos etc. Maybe VLC may need tweaking to get it to play DVDs smoothly, but I havānt taken time to tweak around with it.
I tried VLC, tried to live with WMP [a funny beast], and finally Media Player Classic [MPC]. With VLC, I found I was always having to stop what I was doing and configure something [many times I had no idea what I was actually supposed to do]. I tried MPC, and it has worked fine once downloaded-never a problem. Never.
Iāve come to the conclusion that itās all based on how your computer is configured. A real broad term that means if it works great after installing, keep it, use it, enjoy it. My brother has VLC, and it has worked flawlessly. Not for me.
Overall, the VLC/MPC platforms do what they are supposed to do ā play various forms of media. Iāve given up with WMP, too many quirks that prevent us from playing media. Especially when WMP couldnāt play itās own WMV files. Hooray for open source software.
been using it for years. love it.
Thanks for the tip on VLC Leo. Iāve just been trying it today and it seems absolutely great so far. Time will tell but I plan to use it exclusively and see how it works long-term. Iāve completely given up on Quick Time-it has been nothing but a bother and Apple keeps trying to push things off on me. But for my iPod, Iād remove Apple from my machines for good. Iāve also liked DivX but VLC seems a big improvement over that in that it will play everything. VLC has also allowed me to remove Media Player (which Iāve never liked) from my machines Great tip Leo!
VLC turns out to be a truly great player, thanks Leo!
P.S.:
The VLC that comes with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS is obsolete (wonāt play some formats properly), so you _must_ add āPPAā to your repositories ā and through it fetch the new VLC version ā which works beautifully for all formats! The instructions are on page http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ubuntu.html :
Command line way
% sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lucid-bleed/ppa
% sudo apt-get update
% sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-pulse mozilla-plugin-vlc
Ubuntu PPA repository is much too useful for all sorts of applications to be ignored: see āWhat Is An Ubuntu PPA & Why Would I Want To Use One? [Technology Explained]ā on page http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ubuntu-ppa-technology-explained
Leo ā thanks for your video introduction to VLC Player. I use VLC a lot just because, as you say, it will play almost anything. But thereās an aspect which I dislike strongly, and I wonder if there is a way to change it. Once installed, VLC put an orange-striped-cone icon on every video file on my computer, replacing any other icon that was previously there. (Iām referring to the icon at the beginning of the file name as seen in list view in Windows Explorer or an equivalent such as PowerDesk Pro.) I have been unable to find a way to revert back to the original icons. Is there a way that you know of? And is there a way to prevent that wholesale icon-heisting at the outset? Many thanks.
17-Dec-2011
@Peter
The orange cone is shown for every file which is associated with VLC Media Player. The programās icon is included by Windows for all files which have programs associated with it.