No more CODEC blues with VLC media player

Do you hate Windows Media Player? I’m not sure if I do or not, I like it for playing music, it also looks quite pretty, but when it comes to viewing movies it just sucks big time. This is not really the fault of WMP, more a fault with the way people seem to choose any old CODEC when they encode movie files.
How many times have you double clicked a video file in windows and ended up with either no sound or just a blank player window? If you are really lucky you will get one of those error messages that hints at the fact that WMP is going to go and find the CODEC and download it for you. Of course, we all know that was a joke programmed into WMP by Microsoft, who says Mr Gates has no sense of humor? But you can have the last laugh, and this is where VLC comes in.







VLC or to give it’s full name VideoLAN is a fairly lightweight media player, it is quite capable of playing the full spectrum of sound files, but where it really shines is as a movie player. I have never ever found a video file that VLC cannot play perfectly, no need for CODEC packs and video conversion tools, VLC contains every CODEC know to mankind, and a few that were invented by Aliens (ok Apple Mac users), and as such it simply works.
You won’t find a pretty interface, funky screen gadgets, support for those silly buttons that manufacturers like to stick on a laptop these days and make it look like a DVD player, or massive amounts of system resource usage. You will find an application you cannot live without.





VLC is capable of so much more than simply opening and playing files, check out the picture above, you can clearly see that VLC can open the full range of data sources, from DVDs to video capture devices. And here we have the second hint at the real power of VLC, and something I fully intend to talk about in a future article in some depth.
The first clue is in the name VideoLAN, the second clue is the Open Network Stream on the file menu. VLC is not only a streaming client, it is also a streaming server. Whenever you open a data source in VLC, you have the option of outputting to a stream.
A major function of VLC that is seldom explored by users, is the fact you can change the control interface. I don’t mean visually, I mean functionally. For example, you can tell VLC to stop taking commands from the Windows GUI and start listening over telnet, or from a system console for control commands. A little imagination can come up with some pretty funky uses for this.
My personal favorite is enabling the web interface, which switches on the in-built HTTP server and allows control of the player from a web page. It is the web interface I am going to explore in a forthcoming article, I will describe how I used VLC as the backbone for a TV on demand service for my entire gaming clan.



http://www.videolan.org/vlc/