VLC: The Media Player That Could

When I purchased my first Mac I quickly transfered over all the media files from my old windows based machine and was excited to finally view the content on an operating system with strong media capabilities.

I opened up Quicktime and found a movie in .avi format that I wanted to open. Unfortunately, Quicktime didn’t know what to do with the file and told me I needed to go and find plugins to open the movie. After I found a plugin that would allow Quicktime to play .avi movies I launched the movie again.

Sure enough the picture came in and I was almost convinced that finding quicktime plugins wasn’t too bad. Then I realized.. the audio for the movie wasn’t playing. Quicktime needed another plugin for the audio portion.

ENTER VLC

If this experience sounds similar to you, fear not! There is a wonderful and small FREE media player out there that has everything built into it to quickly play almost any media format.

After struggling with finding quicktime plugins to play all my media formats I cam across VLC. I download the app, installed it, and opened movie after movie after movie without any trouble.

VLC is a wonderful free application. In addition to having a Mac version, the software also comes in Windows and Linux versions. It plays DVDs, CDs, music and video files, and can even stream video across a network or over the internet.

Give VLC a try and check back here atmaciverse.com with RSS for ways to get the most out of your new free Media Player.