Publisher's Description of VLC Media Player:
VLC media player is a free software media player written by the VideoLAN
project. It 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 different formats. It is one of the
most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, BSD, Linux,
Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS, Solaris and Windows CE, and is widely used
with over 65 million downloads. VLC uses a large number of free decoding and
encoding libraries. Many of its codecs are provided by the libavcodec codec
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. Version 0.8.6,
which adds support for WMV version 9 and enhanced support for H.264, was
released on 10 December 2006. VLC is popular for its ability to play video
content of incomplete, unfinished, or damaged video downloads before the files
have been fully downloaded. (For example, files still downloading via BitTorrent
or eMule). 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.
About VLC Media Player: VLC Media Player is open source software and is made
freely availble for personal use. Source code and license information for VLC
Media Player can be found at the
VLC Project Page.
|