VideoLAN VLC 1.1.5 review

Probably the best media player out there - and it's free

Released earlier this week, version 1.1.5 of VideoLAN’s VLC free media player, encoder and streamer is a must-have application for desktop and laptop PC users.

VLC can play just about any media file format, and not just on CDs, DVDs and VCDs. It runs on a range of platforms from Windows to Mac OS X to most Linux distributions, and also Unix flavours.

There is even a version now for Apple's iPad tablet device, and one rumoured to be coming up for the iPhone, highlighting VLC's popularity and versatility.

Although users will primarily use VLC to play media content, it does have a flip side for enterprise use.

In conjunction with VideoLAN's VLMa application, it can be used to stream and manage media content broadcasts from digital terrestrial or satellite channels over local area networks.

The latest point release for VLC took place in June, version 1.1 adding support for graphics processing units (GPU) media decoding on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and GNU/Linux distributions ready for high definition (HD) media content.

We originally looked at version 1.1.4, which was essentially a security release to sort out a flaw in Windows whereby attackers could make applications perform so-called 'DLL-preloading attacks', allowing attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the currently logged in user.

Similarly version 1.1.5 is also a minor release, fixing another security issue and introducing several codec and interface fixes.

Install
We tested v1.1.5 on our Windows 7 Ultimate Intel Core 2 Duo Labs test laptop, a Dell GX280 desktop that dual boots to either Windows XP Professional or the new Linux distribution Red Hat Fedora 14, and the new SL9400 13in screen MacBook Air laptop.

The 20MB 32-bit Windows download installs in under two minutes, and adds Mozilla and ActiveX plug-ins for Firefox and Internet Explorer respectively.

Although the application is 32-bit only, we did install and run it on 64-bit Windows 7 Professional and 64-bit XP Professional systems with no problems observed.

With Apple's new MacBook Air we downloaded the 40MB Mac OS X disk image (.DMG), and installed VLC in under a minute.

A neat feature of VideoLAN's web site is that it automatically serves up the right package for your OS. With our Fedora 14 system VideoLAN also showed the command lines to use for correctly installing the system.

Advanced media programmers can also download the source code for the VLC application.

Features
The main beauty of VLC is the number of file formats it supports, from most audio formats including .AAC (advanced audio coding), .FLAC (free lossless audo codec), .MP3 (MPEG audi layer 3), .OGG (ogg vorbis audio format), and .WAV (waveform audio file).

Supported video formats include .AVI (audio video interleave), .FLV (Flash video), .MOV (Apple QuickTime movie), .MP4 (mpeg-4 video), .MPG (mpeg video), .SWF (flash movie), .VOB (video object) and WMV (Windows media video).

If you want to get an idea of how versatile VLC is, try playing .FLV files on Windows Media Player: it should play the audio part of the file, but won't display video content unless a specific codec is installed – same with .FLAC files.

VLC plays these ‘out of the box’, and doesn’t require extra codecs to be installed, and there are also a variety of audio and video effects tools.

Using VLC on a MacBook Air also showed the versatility of VideoLAN's package.

We also installed VLC on a Red Hat Fedora 14 livecd install, which also showed good stability, and the ability to play all the file formats we used on the Windows install.

'Skinning' the player – i.e. changing the look and feel of the player – is simple and there are lots of skins available online from the VideoLAN's site.

There are also audio tools like a graphic equaliser, and a spatialiser to optimise sound output.

Tools to optimise video output are rather basic, like options to change hue, saturation, contrast, and brightness, although there are more advanced ones on higher spec paid-for packages.

You can also snapshot video files while they are playing, as well as forwarding through video footage frame by frame.

There is also a track synchronisation tool allowing audio and video which is not synchronised to be properly synchronised.

Conclusions
This has to be the best media player bar none, due to its ability to play just about any media file, on any platform, be it Windows, Mac or Linux – and it’s free and distributable under the GNU general public license (GPL).

However, we noted that VLC v1.1.4 was less stable than earlier versions, and we had several instances where the package crashed. However, it's good to report that v1.1.5 appears to have addressed this.

The only other minor niggle is that for some OS support no precompiled executables exist, which means users have to get the VLC source code and the software libraries and compile the application themselves.

OSes affected include Unix ones like FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris, although Gentoo Linux users will also have to build their own VLC application.