VLC media player is one of the most successful multimedia players with open source, which, according to the developers, has been downloaded more than 500 million times. VLC media player is an excellent alternative to Windows Media Player, iTunes and RealPlayer. It’s light, fast, easy to use, and most importantly – it can play almost everything.
The VLC player is a convenient application for playing media files of any type and format. The speed of work, the convenient location of the navigation bar and tab settings – these are the main advantages of the program. In addition to the standard playback option, the player can perform a huge number of interesting functions, which many users don’t even know about.
You can download the latest version of VLC Media Player for free. You only need to find the source file, download it, and then install it on your computer. The installation process is very simple and doesn’t require any special knowledge.
After the installation is completed, you can immediately exploit the player for the intended purpose.
In VLC you can:
- View the streaming video or create your own broadcasts.
- Download files from the Internet.
- Record video from the computer screen.
- Trim clips or audio tracks.
- Apply visual effects to the image.
You can open a movie or a song in VLC by clicking on the desired file in the operating system’s explorer. In the “Open with” menu, select the desired program and wait for the playback to start. Also, files can be opened from the player’s main window.
You can open the video in several ways:
- Select the hard disk space.
- Open the folder. Thus, all audio and video that are in the directory will be reproduced in turn.
- Open the URL to view the streaming video.
- Play an optical disc or flash drive.
To customize the interface, click the Tools tab and select Edit Interface. In the opened window you can change the appearance of the buttons, their location and name.
If you want to learn how you can use VLC at a more advanced level, pay attention to the list of hotkeys. Their use will speed up your work in the Player. A list of combinations of hot keys can be found in the “Tools” window – “Simple settings”.
With the proliferation of portable computing devices with different technical characteristics, the problem of converting multimedia data from one format to another, which can be handled by means of VLC, has never been more relevant.
Just open the program, press Ctrl + R, select one or more objects on the “File” tab and click the “Convert/Save” key. Next, you need to enter the name of the resulting file, select the output format with the appropriate profile to compress the data, and start the processing process by clicking the “Start” button. If desired, you can go to the settings of the profile and play with the parameters of the codecs, the resolution of the picture, bit rate and other characteristics of audio/video up to including in the converted subtitle video.
One of the interesting features of the VLC player is the ability to output video directly to the desktop of the operating system. To activate multimedia wallpapers, whose role can be played by the favorite movie, you should proceed to the advanced settings of the program and in the field “Video” check the box next to “Video on the desktop”. After this, it remains only to select a similar menu item in the main application window and make sure that the operations performed have benefited the cause.
It is common knowledge that the content presented on the YouTube server requires a browser with Adobe Flash plug-in installed or HTML5 support. In the absence of an appropriate web browser, the VLC player can solve the situation. The technique is simple: press Ctrl + N, copy the address of the vending online video clip into the form to enter the URL and click on the “Play” button. In the presence of a mediocre Internet channel, it’s not superfluous to open a tab with additional parameters and to adjust the amount of the cache used for playing the YouTube content. Such foresight will avoid annoying pauses when playing video.
Unlike a number of alternative media players, VLC includes a special tool for creating snapshots of playing movies. There’s no need to mess with the Print Screen key, the operating system’s clipboard and graphics editors – just press Shift + S and the program will automatically record the selected frame to the computer’s disk in the specified directory. By default, images are saved in PNG format, which can be changed to JPG if desired.
Another documented, but a rarely used feature of VLC is the ability to remotely manipulate the program through the web interface. The beauty of it is that any remote computer connected to a LAN can be operated by a computer with an Internet browser on board, no matter if it’s a smartphone or a tablet. You can personally see the flexibility of this tool by activating the remote control interface in the player’s settings and connecting to it through the browser. “In the air” you can steer almost all the main functions of the application: adjust the volume, control the playback of files and playlist, and manipulate the equalizer settings and other VLC parameters.
For lovers to spend free time by solving various kinds of puzzles and logical tasks VLC can also do a good job. Open the window with graphic effects, put a tick in front of the “Puzzle” and get from the video being played a fragmented mosaic that needs to be assembled into a single whole video. The complexity of the game can be adjusted by increasing the components of the puzzle of rows and columns. Control is carried out by means of dexterous moving of elements with the mouse.
Being designed to work with multimedia data, VLC does a good job in performing other tasks. With built-in support for JPG, PNG, XCF, GIF, TIFF, LBM, PCX and Targa (TGA) graphics formats, the player can be used as a simple image viewer, which perfectly complements the above program features.
Nevertheless, despite many different functions, VLC as a simple player for video playback remains a good option.
