Often when you mention the term, VLC player to a person they will look at you a little confused and think that you have lost your mind. The truth of the matter is that this is a great way to watch a number of media formats that offer the user a greater range of options for their media watching experience. There should be a little bit of history that is discussed first concerning the VLC player. The only way to truly understand and appreciate this type of device is to know its history and how it has become a popular media player for a number of people.
The VLC or VideoLan Client was initially began as a way to stream videos across a campus network. This allowed students all over the Ecole Centrale Paris campus to enjoy videos without a lot of fancy equipment or software to be used. As time progressed, it was more and more obvious that this system was catching on and further development of the player was made a priority for the students and faculty to get this out to the rest of the open source community for use on their computers.
Over the last, several years the media player has underwent a number of different redesigns and incarnations in an attempt to find a perfect place that this could strive in the open source marketplace. One thing that has set this apart from the rest of the media players on the market is that VLC has a remote feature that allows it to be controlled from a remote location. This is perfect if you are at work and your child wants to listen to their favorite band, you can control the media player from work and not have to be there in person to control the player. In addition, the ability to cross platform helps to set it apart from a number of the others that are solely properties of their respective companies. It is difficult if not impossible to get the same type of quality form Windows Media Player on an Apple and vice versa for iTunes on a Windows machine.
One unique feature is that the traffic cone that represents VLC has a hidden Easter egg. For a person that may not know an Easter egg is a command that is launched when a particular event happens. In this case, the Easter egg is that on December 18th the traffic cone changes to where it is wearing a Santa hat. This remains in lace until the week after Christmas.
When looking for a VLC player download site, there are a number of open source websites that offer this for free to a user. If you are using an operating system such as Ubuntu, then you are able to get this as a download from a number of the repositories that are offered on the network. Once you have this downloaded the installation is quite simple and will give you a player that will be looked at as being second to none in regard to the ability for playing a number of media on your computer. You will often say that it is one of the better media players on the market today.