VLC (VideoLAN) is a multi-platform multimedia player. VLC Player, also sometimes called VideoLAN Player, that is well known for being self contained in that it requires no external codecs, and will play nearly all video formats in the world today. It is an Open Source media player that is cross platform, supporting Microsoft Windows, Mac, Linux, and other operating systems. It can read DVDs, VCDs, MPEG, and DivX files and from a satellite card. It can also read a stream from a network sent by the VideoLAN Server or another source. The stream can be MPEG 2 TS in UDP or HTTP packets unicasted or multicasted on an IPv4 or IPv6 network.
VLC and VideoLan distinction: VideoLAN is a project that develops software for playing video and other media formats. It originally developed two programs for media streaming—VideoLAN Client (VLC) and VideoLAN Server (VLS). Most of the features of VLS have been incorporated into VLC, with the result renamed VLC media player. It started off as a project to create a video streaming server and playback client. Originally, there was a Video Lan Server and a Video Lan Client for each of the functions. But the cross platform media player gained popularity and soon the server was reduced to a component of the Media player.
Features
VLC’s basic features are similar to those of WMP. Playback rate can be increased or decreased, but, audio is disabled during altered rate of playback. Contrast, brightness, color saturation, etc., of the video can be changed easily. Adding effects to the movie, like blurring, cloning, etc., is an easy task since the menu is easily accessible. VLC packs a streaming server which allows streaming any video from any source, like a tuner card or DVD, over the network. A wizard that makes setting this up easier is a life saver. A stream capture client allows you to save any video streamed over a network, including the Net. An inbuilt video editor and transcoder allows saving part of a file in a format of your choice.
As of mid 2010 VLC still lacks support for 3G Mobile Phones Video. Windows Media Player lacks support for this format also.
Review
VLC offers much more than Microsoft Windows Media Player. It is without a doubt the right solution for those who are looking for a simple media player. Because it is self contained, there are no confusing codec error messages and no DRM issues to contend with. Just click on the media file to launch VLC and it plays it, fast and easy. Insert a DVD and VLC will play it, that easy.
An alternative to VLC is SMPlayer, which has many of the same features with a different command set and user experience. SMPlayer will play 3G Mobile Phones Video which the last tested version of VLC would not.
Command Support Q&A
Q: How to Zoom and Crop (wide screen to 4:3)
- A: A combination of O and Z crop and zoom in VLC Player.
Q: How to enable "Advanced Controls" such as frame by frame, record, and etc.
- A: Goto "View"->"Advanced Controls".
Q: How to make player repeat movie as a default setting.
- A: Goto "Tools"->"Preferences"->"Show Settings:All" choose "Playlist" and check the box "Repeat current item" then SAVE. Now it will be in repeat mode by default when you open new media.
Keyboard Shortcuts
- f Fullscreen
- Space Pause or play movie
- v Subtitles cylce/off
- b Audio track cycle
- Ctrl+Arrow Up/Ctrl+Arrow Down Volume
- Ctrl+d Open disc menu
- Ctrl+f Open folder (browse folder menu)
- Ctrl+r/Ctrl+s Advanced open file
- Ctrl+o Open single file(s)
- m Mute and unmute audio
- p Play movie (from the very beginning)
- s Stop movie
- Esc Exit full screen mode
- [+]/-/= Faster, slower, normal
- a Aspect ratio
- c Crop screen
- g/h Increase or decrease subtitle delay
- j/k Increase or decrease audio delay
- z Change zoom mode
- Ctrl+1, ctrl+2, ctrl+3, ctrl+4 Recent media (in Media - Recent media menu)
- t Show time
- Ctrl+t Goto time
source: http://www.shortcutworld.com/en/win/VLC-Media-Player_1.html
Operation
Disable Auto Subtitles
Subtitle files are those of the same name of the video file ending with a .srt extension. When an srt file is present with the video file, such as an avi container file, videolan will automatically display those subtitle text within playing video. This default behavior can be modified.
Go to "Preferences" in your VLC video player under the "Tools" menu. Select "All" under "Show Settings." Choose "Video" and then "Subtitles/OSD." Uncheck the boxes for "Autodetect subtitle files." Make sure "sub-pictures" and "On Screen Display" are enabled.
This is specifically for subtitles that are sourced from a separate file. It does not related to optional "embedded" subtitles built into some video file types, such as mkv files, and "forced" subtitles that are encoded graphically as part of the video frames.
Check video for Embedded Subtitles
Some video files, such as Matroska Video (.mkv) have the ability to contain optional subtitles embedded in the container, as opposed to being either in a seperate .srt file or burned into the video frames graphically.
Select Tools, Media Info (or press CTRL-J) and select the "codec details" tab.
According to the VLC manual, embedded subtitles visibility is disabled by default. This is untrue. VLC 2.0.2 Twoflower defaults to displaying embedded subtitles when playing mkv video.
Workaround for Subtitles Glitch
Subtitle track 0 is recognized as the last item on the subtitle track listing instead of the first. The first would be 'disabled.' This can be compensated for by doing the following (source: special thanks to Geoffrey of the videolan forum.)
- Tools, Preferences (CTRL-P)
- Show Settings: ALL
- Choose "Input/CODECS"
- The 5th item next after Audio Track is Subtitles Track. Change value -1 to 99.
There won't be 99 tracks, so VLC will disable subtitles. Additionally, if the subtitle track is not useful in anyway, such as it is a foreign language you don't care about, and you wish to strip it out of the mkv file, you can use a free utility that is part of mkvtoolnix.
Compensate for Audi Synchronization Problem in Video
Audio out of sync in a flix you are watching? Speech not matching lips? In the VLC Preferences, click on Audio and then tick the Advanced options checkbox; there is an Audio desynchronization compensation setting that allows you to set a positive or negative time delay between the video and audio tracks in milliseconds.
source: Fix Desynchronized Video and Audio with VLC
Dealing with Ugly Interlaced Video
VLC media player has deinterlacing off by default.
You can enable it for the currently playing video by using the main menus, the right-click menus, turn deinterlacing on and choose blend mode.
Note that if you enable deinterlacing from the menu, the setting will only take effect for the currently playing video. When the video ends, both the on/off/automatic and the mode settings will return to the values set in the preferences. If you want to always enable deinterlacing on every video, type "Deinterlace" in the Video Filter preferences.
source: Deinterlacing on VideoLAN WiKi
Advanced Features Support
Recording With VLC
Desktop Capture and Stream
It is possible to capture the activity on your windows desktop (probably linux and other os support too) and stream it to a client. You can use a screen as input for VLC, with "screen://" as the input URL. You can stream it, resized or transcoded using "--sout".
screen://
It will not capture and stream audio.
Using directshow as the filter you can further control regions and other parts of the desktop streaming.
Security and Privacy
asf vulnerability in Versions 2.0.5 and earlier
A vulnerability in the VLC component responsible for playing ASF files could allow the execution of arbitrary code. The flaw can be exploited by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted ASF file. A temporary fix is to manually delete the vulnerable libasf_plugin.dll file from the VLC installation directory. DELETE:
libasf_plugin.dll
A patch will be included in VLC 2.0.6. Keep in mind that VLC installs plug-ins for Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera and Konqueror for playback of video files embedded into Web pages. These are high risk factors for executing code in loaded asf media.