VLC media player

Whether you need a universal, feature-rich, professional player for all your media, or you just want to play few movies and clips not cramming your head full of geeky things, your choice is the same – VLC Player. This piece of software is wonderfully simple and extremely powerful at the same time.

VLC Player is a free, open-source project maintained solely by the community of VideoLAN Organization. The key factor of why VLC Player has gained its enormous popularity is firm support for virtually anything that can be played. The player reads dozens of video and audio codecs, provides support for CD, DVD, and BluRay disks, understands various subtitle formats, and offers many input and output options.

The minimalistic interface has nothing extra yet provides everything at a glance. Though, if you are into flourishing interfaces, 120+ skins are waiting for you at the official website of the tool. Controlling playback or capture, configuring audio or video codecs, or navigating through DVD chapters – just about any action you might want is ready and waiting. And for convenience, controls automatically hide when you watch a movie fullscreen. Literally, this player has really got everything for effortless watching or listening!

Experienced users also get their share of the cake. VLC Player can work as a unicast or multicast stream server in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network, if you’re dreaming of your own small broadcasting company. A number of add-ons provide subtitle manipulation, enhanced navigation through played videos, and other useful functions not yet implemented by the player itself. The program also supports streaming videos, webcams, and other devices, not to mention myriads of supported formats, many of which are played without any third-party codecs.

Audio and video effects also come as standard - dynamic range compressor, graphics equalizer, sound spatializer, interactive zoom, color adjustments, rotation for arbitrary angles, special effects like blur, sepia, waves, AtmoLight, etc. Also, with a number of built-in tools you can fix audio/video desynchronizing or adjust brightness, saturation, or contrast of the video.

VLC Player is available for most platforms - Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, BeOS - and is strongly supported through a community-driven wiki, forums, and comprehensive help files. VLC Player is four F’s: free (where “free” means “no ads or spyware installed”), fast, functional, and friendly. It is really hard to get this combination no matter the type of software, so grab this one while you can!