VLC Media Player turns 1.0

Chris White 7 Jul, 2009 at 6:26pm ET Article published in Tech

When it comes to media players, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more flexible solution than the VLC Media Player. We’ve always liked VLC because it will play just about any kind of video you throw at it, regardless of the platform, often without the use of external codecs.

VLC may not have the prettiest interface or the flashiest site, but today’s version 1.0 is the most feature-complete playback solution you can possibly download. That makes it a winner in our book.

Bonus: A portable version of VLC will soon be available courtesy of PortableApps. Piss off your administrators by bringing something better than Windows Media Player to work on a USB key.

Comments

7 Jul 2009 ~ 9:08pm mirage I want to love VLC player and stick with it. But it is still not an as good video converter as a player. Just tried to convert one of my DVDs into PS3 format. The previous RC and 0.9.x versions were not even able to start conversion. This, supposedly final, version completes the conversion but some part of the video at the end has no sound.
7 Jul 2009 ~ 9:55pm fatcat 0.9.9 for life!
7 Jul 2009 ~ 9:59pm Thrax Media Player Classic > VLC.
7 Jul 2009 ~ 10:21pm pigflipper

Thrax wrote:

Media Player Classic > VLC.

I think I might have to agree, I've now had VLC crash at least a dozen times in the 2 hours since install.
7 Jul 2009 ~ 10:23pm Linc VLC is my backup "I've never even heard of this format" player.
7 Jul 2009 ~ 11:37pm Grimnoc I use Media Player Classic for the most part, though I've had no problems with VLC either.
7 Jul 2009 ~ 11:48pm Snarkasm VLC is my .mkv player while I hunt for exactly the right codec that'll let it work with everything else. Always takes forever to find that one...
7 Jul 2009 ~ 11:50pm Thrax MKV doesn't use codecs. It's not a codec.
7 Jul 2009 ~ 11:59pm Snarkasm It's a container, I misworded. We've already been over this.
8 Jul 2009 ~ 1:01am DrLiam I've still yet to find anything more valuable than the K-Lite codex pack. I did encounter VLC before I found K-Lite but I wasn't fond of it's design or layout. That said though, maybe 1.0 might be worth testing out.
8 Jul 2009 ~ 3:10am Mikail-Critchki I use SMPlayer; When I checked which had the best image quality, it won. I know you can fix "boxiness" with filters but when I tried the quality got worse. SMPlayer plays it straight away without difficulty.

By the way, SMPlayer uses MPlayer.
8 Jul 2009 ~ 3:20am primesuspect Hey Mikail! Long time no see!
9 Jul 2009 ~ 8:29pm ardichoke I do enjoy Media Player Classic, it refuses to play DVDs on my desktop though. VLC plays them just fine though. That right there gives VLC a permanent place on my desktop. Oh... and VLC is a godsend on Linux.
9 Jul 2009 ~ 9:29pm chrisWhite

ardichoke wrote:

I do enjoy Media Player Classic, it refuses to play DVDs on my desktop though. VLC plays them just fine though. That right there gives VLC a permanent place on my desktop. Oh... and VLC is a godsend on Linux.

Oh man, I haven't jacked with Windows Media Player Classic in ages, probably not since I first started using VLC actually.

We go through a ton of videos in every imaginable format at the labs I work with since everyone has videos from a million different sources and VLC just rocks at everything. I still use Quicktime where I can, I really like being able to scrub it so responsibly and go frame by frame but everything else goes through VLC. It's especially good for playing .flv files.