Three (More) Things You Can Do With VLC
VLC is not your average media player.
In addition to supporting every single format known to humans, it has more features than you ever thought you’d need. VLC (which stands for VideoLAN client) just released a new version, 0.8.6.
I’ve always been a loyal user of the application, but in celebration of the release, I decided to learn more about VLC and figure out why it’s unchallenged in its field. Here’s a rundown of three features offered by VLC that bump it up from “average media player” to “uber media player”.
- WMV9 and H.264 support: How many times have you tried to open a WMV and have it crash, or attempt to open a Quicktime file and have it not even show up? VLC now supports both these formats. It’s a relatively simple feature (some wouldn’t even call it a feature) but it enables you to uninstall two more media players. Further, you can reduce our support of proprietary apps (but that’s more of a FOSSwire argument).
- Play unfinished downloads: If you use BitTorrent or a similar download application (which I’m sure you don’t), VLC offers the ability to play video that hasn’t finished downloading. If you’re an active downloader and have limited time, here’s a perfect way to catch up on all your video without waiting as long as you might have to!
- Deinterlace on the fly: Perhaps I’m just easily impressed, but the ability to deinterlace on the fly amazed me. I recently completed a montage project using war protest footage from Archive.org and had to interlace it for DVD output. As such, it looks terrible on a computer monitor! VLC was able to easily take the footage into non-interlaced footage and still have it look decent! There are still a few interlace artifacts, but it’s barely noticeable. I’m impressed. (screens below)
Without Interlacing and With Interlacing
VLC is a powerful player. I’ve just scraped the surface of what it can do — if you have experience with the app, you can easily record and convert streams, change your video’s look with filters, and a lot more. If you aren’t familiar with the application, this is the perfect time to learn about it.
VLC is awesome.
Actually, I must confess that I don’t actually use it – I use a similar project called Mplayer which gets me my QuickTime/WMV/MPEG/<insert proprietary media format here> fix on Linux (there’s also OS X and Windows versions I think).
Still, VLC is brilliant and it has the benefit of a nice friendly GUI on all platforms.
There’s really no excuse not to run VLC (or something like it), since it’s available on Windows, Linux and the Mac.
Definitely could be worthy of a FOSSwire post in due course!