The VLC media player or popularly known as the VLC is a portable application made by VideoLAN – the project that develops software for playing video and other media formats across a LAN (local area network) as well as DVD, audio CD, VCD and other streaming protocols. VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player with different versions for different operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and others.
VLC supports a wide range of formats. It is a good hotkey support and easy to use. It is very flexible and lightweight. It integrates with web channel streaming services. VLC player is ranked to be the best among hundreds of media players available in the market out there.
Before, VLC stood for VideoLAN Client not until VideoLAN developed a more improved VLC. Now, VLC is not just simply a client. VideoLAN always make innovations to improve VLC through developing another version.
VLC Features
As VLC was improved to another version, advanced features are also added to this multimedia player application. VLC can support almost all sorts of formats but it will also depend on what OS you are using.
The advanced VLC version can’t just only do control, manage and customize media files regardless of the format but can also have the empowerment of a massive amount of playback, recording, and streaming options.
VLC allows you to play damaged, incomplete, and/or broken content. You can install it through a CD or flash disk unlike other programs. You can also personalize your VLC skin. You can choose from a long range of languages installed in the system and set the streaming capacities of the multimedia player. There are available skin editors and interface that you may need. You can use VLC as an online video downloader for YouTube and many others. It can also rip DVDs. It provides you a basic DVD ripper that can help you rip a movie for you. You can listen to online radio through VLC’s hundreds of radio stations. Just enable the feature and open the playlist to browse for your favorite radio stations. Another feat, you can convert audio and video files from a certain format to another.
For playback features, readable formats include: Input (HTTP, MMS, DVDs, VCD, SVCD, audio CD, RSS feeds, and other files stored on the user’s computer), Container format (3GP, ASF, AVI, FLV, Musical Instrument Digital Interface, QuickTime, MP4, WAV, MPEG-2, AIFF, raw DV, VOB), video formats (DV, MPEG-4 AVC, MJPEG, MPEG-4, RealVideo, and some WMV), subtitles (MPEG-4 Timed Text, Text file), audio formats (AAC, MP3, WMA), audio/video filters (deinterlace, cropping, image adjust, logo overlay, magnification, image distortion, visualization, equalizer), audio/video outputs (Native), interfaces (skins, web, command line, mouse gestures), and other miscellaneous (localization, CPU acceleration).
For streaming features, these includes: inputs, output, miscellaneous, interfaces and more; output method muxer, audio and video format muxer; and possible output formats for the transcoding module.
Furthermore, as Blu-Ray discs are in the limelight, VLC can now also plays files without any troubles but it depends upon your computer’s capacity to handle the format as well as the size of the file. The player handles different device formats and the optimization built in the program allows you to have the best quality of sound, speed, and images. No need for codec anymore, you can play your entire album through VLC media player.
In conclusion, VLC media player is a professional grade multimedia player with all the possible features users might be searching for – all for free.
