VLC Media Player
Introduction
VLC Media Player is a very compact, cross-platform multimedia player that can handle some of the most popular audio and video formats. Apart from that, VLC Media Player can be used as a DVD/VCD player and it can also be used as a multimedia content streaming server.
VLC Media Player Installation:
You can download VLC Media Player from the official website: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ .
- Double click on the setup
- Select the language that you want and click “OK”
- Click “Next” and then “I Agree”
- Select the components that you want to install and click “Next”
- Select the location where you want VLC Media Player to be installed and click “Install”
- Click Finish!
That’s it; now let’s play a little bit with our new software.
How to use VLC Media Player:
Launch VLC Media Player either by opening the desktop shortcut or by going to:
Start->Programs->VideoLAN->VLC Media Player
This is what you should be looking at:
- In the image above you can see the menus, the playback controls and the volume control.
- To the left side of the volume control, there is a button which you can press in order to manage your playlist(s).
- Now, go to File->Open
- At the top of the “Open…” dialog, there are 4 tabs. We will only be discussing about the first tab, the “File” one but as soon as you start familiarizing with the software you will find out that the other features are very easy to handle too
- In the “File” tab, I have marked 2 areas. Not surprisingly, the first area is marked with the number #1 and it is there where you can load your files from (by pressing the “Browse…” button or by specifying the full path manually).
- The second area (marked with number #2) is the subtitle area. Here, you can load subtitles for your movie by ticking the “Use a subtitles file” and by specifying the exact location of the subtitle file.
Conclusion
VLC Media Player is a very powerful multimedia utility. You can use it to play some of the most popular audio/video formats, to watch DVDs/VCDs but you can also use some of its more advanced features such as multimedia streaming.
