Are you looking for the “workhorse” of media players software? Look no further, VLC (VideoLAN) is your answer. VideoLAN is an open source media player, it is cross-platform (meaning that you can use it in Mac OS x, Windows and Linux); it support many audio, video formats and codecs (mpeg, wmv, h.264, real video, xvid, divx, avi, ogg, mp3, aac, wma, lpcm, flac, dolby digital plus, just to name a few); it is user friendly and, best of all, it is free!

Having VLC means that you don’t need to hunt down and install individual codec or codec packs to play a video or audio file. VLC comes built-in with most, if not all, of the codecs you will ever need. One of the great things about VLC is that it can play damaged files or files with missing pieces.

Beside all of the good things about VLC, the new version 1.1.2 comes pack with a lot of new features.

Now your videos will look smoother because VLC supports hardware acceleration or GPU decoding in Windows 7 and for GNU/Linux (meaning that the computer CPU will get a break and it will not sweat as much as when playing videos, because now some of the work gets pass on to the graphics card). There were a lot of improvement for MKV HD and new support codecs, like Blu-Ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless and VP8. You also get multi channel audio decoding.

VLC run faster than earlier versions and it is lighter because some unused functionalities were moved to extensions, which are additional features that can be installed later.

If you would like to learn more about then VLC playback features follow this link here!

Conclusion

This is a piece of software that everyone should have! It is simple to install and use, so next time that a video is not playing in a different media player give VLC a try.

  • VLC Download page