Sunday, 11 May 2014
VLC media player is a free software media player written by the VideoLAN project.
VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats. VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but that meaning is now deprecated.
It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, Syllable, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS and Solaris, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads for version 0.8.6.
VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries; on the Windows platform, this greatly reduces the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins. Many of VLC’s codecs are provided by the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses mainly its own muxer and demuxers. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library.
Originally the VideoLAN project was intended to consist of a client and server to stream videos across a network. Originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris, it is now developed by contributors worldwide. VLC was the client for the VideoLAN project, with VLC standing for VideoLAN Client. It was released under the GPL on February 1, 2001. The functionality of the server program, VideoLAN Server (VLS), has mostly been subsumed into VLC and has been discontinued[citation needed]. The project name was changed to VLC media player since there is no longer a client/server infrastructure.
The cone icon used in VLC is a reference to the traffic cones collected by Ecole Centrale’s Networking Students’ Association. The cone icon design was changed from a hand drawn low resolution icon to a higher resolution CGI rendered version in 2006.
VLC Media Player Features
* VLC is popular for its ability to play the video content of incomplete, unfinished, or damaged video downloads before the files have been fully downloaded. (For example, files still downloading via BitTorrent, eMule, or Gnutella). It also plays m2t MPEG Transport Streams (.TS) files while they are still being digitized from an HDV camera via a FireWire cable, making it possible to monitor the video as it is being played. This is because it is a packet-based player.* The player also has the ability to use libcdio to access .iso files so that the user can play files on a disk image, even if the user’s operating system does not have the capability of working directly with .iso images.
* VLC supports all codecs and all file formats supported by FFmpeg. This means that DVD Video and MPEG-4 playback as well as support for Ogg and Matroska (MKV) file formats work “out of the box”. However, this feature is not unique to VLC, as any player using the FFmpeg libraries, including MPlayer and xine-lib-based players, can play those formats without need for external codecs. VLC also supports codecs that are not included in FFmpeg.
* VLC media player has some filters that can distort, rotate, split, deinterlace, mirror videos, create display walls, or add a logo overlay. It can also produce video output as ASCII art.
* VLC media player can play high definition recordings of D-VHS tapes duplicated to a computer using CapDVHS.exe. This offers another way to archive all D-VHS tapes with the DRM copy freely tag. An entire library of tapes (or about 50 D-VHS 2 hours long) can be placed on a single terabyte sized hard drive. However, they must be imported by playing the tapes in real time, and can’t simply be copied as data files.
* Using a FireWire connection from cable boxes to computers, VLC can stream live, unencrypted content to a monitor or HDTV.
* VLC media player can display the playing video as the desktop wallpaper, like Windows DreamScene, but this feature is not currently available on Linux.
* VLC media player can do screencasts and record the desktop.
* On Microsoft Windows, VLC also supports the Direct Media Object (DMO) framework and can therefore make use of some third-party DLLs.
* VLC can be installed and run directly from a flash or other external drive.
