VLC Media Player is a potent multimedia player capable of running various video and audio formats as well as accessing DVDs, VCDs, and some streaming protocols.
It is also compatible with streaming in multicast or unicast in IPv4 or IPv6 using high-bandwidth connectivity.
VLC became so popular because it can play pretty much anything. It doesn’t require extra codecs to play the content you want to.
VLC has flashy features like a complete streaming server, with additional features like on-the-fly transcoding, video on demand, advanced speed controls, frame-by-frame progress, and many more. The fact that it can work as a server for unicast or multicast streaming makes it even better.
The player can be modified to your liking thanks to the ability to add custom toolbars, custom skins.
Also, VLC can smoothly play broken files or even files that haven’t finished downloading.
Changes
The player occasionally receives updates that make it incrementally better. Here are some of the most significant changes that were done to the player during the latest updates:
- “Properly bump the version in configure.ac
- Fixed DVD glitches on clip change
- Added libsmb2 support for SMB2/3 shares
- Misc raw H264/HEVC frame rate fixes
- avcodec: revector video decoder to fix incomplete drain
- Update libfaad to 2.9.1
- Added support for iOS audio unit audio above 48KHz
- Fix for OpenGL glitches in some drivers
- Update libmicrodns to 0.1.2
- Update YouTube, SoundCloud, and Vocaroo scripts: this restores the playback of YouTube URLs.
- Improved Chromecast audio quality.”
As you can see, the developers of VLC Media Player are working hard to keep the app running as smooth as possible, while also making it compatible with the latest trends in the matter of media players.
We can safely say that they are doing an excellent job for the most part, and the number of active VLC users is strong evidence of that.
