Free Penguin download - vlc
32 bit deb for Ubuntu
deb for Debian
rpm for PCLinuxOS
64 bit deb for Ubuntu
deb for Debian
VLC media player is a free software media player
written by the VideoLAN project. It is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs,
and various streaming protocols.It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats.VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but that meaning is now deprecated. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, BSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Windows CE, and is widely used with over 65 million downloads for version 0.8.6. VLC uses a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries.
Many of its codecs are provided by the libavcodec codec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses mainly its own muxer and demuxers.
It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on GNU/Linux by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library. Version 0.8.6, which adds support for WMV version 9 and enhances support for H.264, was released on 10 December 2006. VLC has a very modular design which makes it easier to include modules for new file formats, codecs or streaming methods.
This principle also stretches to other areas and there is a wide selection of interfaces, video and audio outputs, controls, and audio and video filter modules. There are more than 300 modules in VLC. The standard GUI is based on wxWidgets for Windows and GNU/Linux, Cocoa for Mac OS X, and Be API on BeOS; but all give a similar standard interface.
A Qt 4 interface is also in the works for GNU/Linux and Windows. VLC supports highly customizable skins through the skins2 interface, Winamp 2 and XMMS skins. For console fans, VLC has an ncurses interface. As VLC can act as a streaming server, rather than a media player, it can be useful to control it from a remote location and there are interfaces allowing this.
The Remote Control Interface is a text-based interface for doing this. There are also interfaces using telnet and HTTP (AJAX).
Main Features:
* The player also has the ability to use libcdio to access .iso files so that the user can play files on a disk image, even if the user's operating system does not have the capability of working directly with .iso images.
* VLC supports all codecs and all file formats supported by FFmpeg. This means that DVD Video and MPEG-4 playback as well as support for Ogg and Matroska (MKV) file formats work "out of the box". However, this feature is not unique to VLC, as any player using the FFmpeg libraries, including MPlayer and xine-lib-based players, can play those formats without need for external codecs. VLC does, however, also support codecs that are not included in FFmpeg.
* VLC media player has some filters that can distort, rotate, split, deinterlace, mirror videos, create display walls, or add a logo overlay. It can also produce video output as ASCII art.
* VLC media player can play high definition recordings of D-VHS tapes duplicated to a computer using CapDVHS.exe. This offers another way to archive all D-VHS tapes with the DRM copy freely tag. An entire library of tapes (or about 50 D-VHS 2 hours long) can be placed on a single terabyte sized hard drive. However, they must be imported by playing the tapes in real time, and can't simply be copied as data files.
* Using a FireWire connection from cable boxes to computers; VLC can stream live, unencrypted content to a monitor or HDTV.
* VLC media player can display the playing video
as the desktop wallpaper.
