Much more than basic playback features the program has been specializing more enhancement in media handling . This is clearly shown by the possibilities for adding subtitles and handle multiple audio tracks attached to a movie. This feature is indispensable when it comes to DVD playing. It can also handle DVD menus and chapters.VLC Media Player offers an endless list of features, including support for different audio and video formats. Its compatibility with all types of media files is based on the fact that VLC doesn't depends on codecs installed in the system while it brings its own set. Moreover, this versatile media player can also play ripped DVDs, stream media from the web or network, amazingly it is also able to help us fix our files if video and audio are desynchronized.
VLC media player is available for free and is one reason which makes it popular and happening, the quality the media player, What VLC provides is really ace and even Real player doesn’t give such outstanding buffering of video and images. Besides being free, VideoLAN VLC Media Player has multilingual support, including more than 40 languages where we can change the interface language any time we want even if we have selected a determinate one during setup.
Among the new features, you’ll find the following:
- Instantaneous pausing
- Frame by frame playback
- Finer playback speed control
- New and fixed audio and video decoders
- On-the-fly recording for all media
- Timeshift for most media
- On the fly zip file decompression and browsing
- Support for DVB-S and ATSC cards on Windows
- Experimental Blu-Ray disc and AVCHD folder support
- New Blu-Ray Linear PCM decoder
- Customizable interface controls
- Global Hotkeys on Windows and Linux
- Controllable by multimedia keys on modern Apple keyboards (OS X only)
- Several new and improved decoders, demuxers, encoders, and other codec-related goodies
VLC's major highlight is the smooth support for over 100s of formats which includes
Container formats
3GP, ASF, AVI, FLV, Matroska, Musical Instrument Digital Interface (.mid/.midi),QuickTime, MP4, Ogg, OGM, WAV, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), AIFF, Raw audio, Raw DV, MXF, VOB.
Video formats
Cinepak, Dirac, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo 3&4, Sorenson (thus enabling direct playback of the modified Sorenson H.263 encoded videos downloaded from YouTube), Theora, VC-1, VP5, VP6, WMV.
Subtitles
DVD, SVCD, DVB, OGM, SubStation Alpha, SubRip, Advanced SubStation Alpha, MPEG-4 Timed Text, Text file, Vobsub, MPL2, Teletext.
Audio formats
AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, DTS, DV Audio, XM, FLAC, MACE, Mod, MP3, PLS, QDM2/QDMC, RealAudio, Speex, Screamtracker 3/S3M, TTA, Vorbis, WavPack, WMA (WMA 1/2, WMA 3 partially)
In short, with the new interface, VLC has become more "usable", and improvements in performance are notable. Maybe VLC Media Player is not the only nor the best free media player, but one thing I can tell for sure, when it comes to performance issues with some heavy videos, you might want to give it a try.
