This major step forward has divided the VLC community since it first emerged, with some decrying the loss of version 1’s minimalist approach to video playback. Version 2 brought radical changes, most found on the Mac platform, with support for Blu-ray playback being overshadowed by a radical overhaul of the user interface. It also supports Internet-based media streaming, so you can use the player to listen to a streamed audio stream and much more. This is a cross-platform versatile media player that does one thing well: attempts to play just about every format available.īy installing VLC Media Player across your various computers, you can be assured that a video that plays back on your Mac will also play on your PC. This isn’t a recent application, although it’s been ages in development. There must be a better way, a way of handling the various audio and video formats, without having to experiment with different media players. Factor in old videos that were encoded using codecs that have been long discontinued, then it becomes a real pain to just play back your collection of movies.

Whilst the various media player developers attempt to convince us to use their codec to encode our home video, this means that we often have to have more than one media player installed to play every video, audio and other media, on our computer.