Free media player for every OS tackles DVDs, DivX, video streams, and more. It also lets you stream your media.

Video LAN Client (VLC), possibly the last best word in freeware media players, supports all major codecs, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MP3, DivX, Ogg Vorbis, VCD, and, yes, DVD. On today's "Call for Help" I show you how to use the small portable player for video playback. I'll even tell you how to stream your DVDs.

Major selling points
  • Portable
    What do I mean by portable? I mean you can get it for every conceivable Unix-like OS (Linux, BeOS, BSD, and Mac OS X) as well as Windows.

  • A note about DVD playback
    VLC doesn't enforce region codes, meaning you can play out-of-region DVDs with no problem. My Region 2 and Region 4 DVDs worked just fine on my home computer. Of course it gets better.

  • Streaming!
    The real kicker: VLC doesn't just play back media files. Oh no, my friend, it can also stream them. That's right, you can now stream every media file, including DVDs, over a network. The only thing you need to worry about is network bandwidth, especially with DVDs. I smell a killer app for Gigabit Ethernet.


So how well does it work? Pretty darn well. The reasonably easy-to-use interface doesn't look or behave as polished as a commercial release, but overall it's very functional.

Get the party started
When you want to play something, open the file icon, click the disc icon for your DVD or CD, or click one of the circular arrows to view a network media stream. A dialog box will appear asking you for additional settings or options.

Set up your stream
When you wish to stream content, check the box next to Stream Output and click Settings. Although VLC is designed to work with most Internet transport protocols, the easiest one I got running was the UDP. Do not fill anything in the Destination Target box. It will auto-fill when you click a transport method. Now enter the target machine's IP, URL, or multicast IP address (if you have a multicast server setup).

To view the stream, launch VLC on the target or client machine, click the Network icon, and click View the Stream.

VLC is a very powerful piece of software and I recommend you read the manual and site documentation several times before using it.

Download VLC now