This media player has been downloaded more than 1 Billion times and outperforms both iTunes & Windows Media Player.–PC Pitstop.
The Most Popular Media Player on Earth
by Bob Rankin
Do you play music or videos on your PC, Mac or mobile device? Frustrated with the limitations of iTunes or Windows Media Player? Here comes VLC Media Player to the rescue! Read on…
VLC Media Player: A Better Way
VLC Media Player is one of the most popular programs on Earth; it passed the one-billion-downloads mark in 2012. Today, it’s available on more operating systems than any other media player, and it just keeps getting better.
Version 2.2.0 of VLC Media Player was released on February 27 in the program’s first all-platforms simultaneous release. That includes desktop versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and several flavors of Linux; mobile versions for Apple/iOS, Android, and Windows Phone; and even versions for Windows RT and Android TV.
The latest version includes highly desired new features like the ability to detect vertically oriented video and rotate it automatically, and the ability to re-start a video at the point where you left off or closed it accidentally. Additionally, over 1,000 bugs have been fixed in this release and support for a “very large number” of unusual codecs has been added, further reducing the chance that you will ever encounter a multimedia file that VLC can’t play.
VLC Media Player
The iOS version’s user interface has been made more like iTunes and the Android version now conforms to Google’s new Material Design standards. “Moving VLC to the mobile world was difficult, but the difficult is done,” VideoLAN President Jean-Baptiste Kempf said in a statement. “VLC runs everywhere, plays everything.”
That is the whole point of VLC Media Player, of course. The open-source project got its start in 2001, a time when numerous software developers were trying to establish dominance in multimedia by imposing their proprietary file formats on everyone. VLC set out to support Windows Media Video (WMV), Apple QuickTime (MOV), RealPlay’s RealAudio and RealVideo, and every other format. Today, it’s the Swiss Army Knife of media players. Just install VLC on every device you own and don’t worry about converting one file format to another.
