Video LAN Client (VLC) Media Player

Platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, etc.

It started off as a project to create a video streaming server and playback client. And originally had Video LAN server and Video LAN client for each of the task. But the crossplatform media player gained popularity and soon the server was reduced to a component of the Media player. It’s a highly capable media player and comes with a lot of features.

Features

Playback rate can be increased or decreased, but unlike Media Player Classic, the audio is disabled during altered rate of playback. Contrast, brightness, colour saturation, etc., of the video can be changed easily. Adding effects to the movie, like blurring, cloning, etc., is an easy task since the menu is easily accessible. VLC packs a streaming server which allows streaming any video from any source, like a tuner card or DVD, over the network. A wizard that makes setting this up easy is what keeps it cool. A stream capture client allows you to save any video streamed over a network, including the Net. An inbuilt video editor and transcoder allows saving part of a file in format of your choice. On the flip side, its menu system is bulkier than MPC, and the seek bar doesn’t work quite well either. It has the annoying tendency to skip predefined parts in a clip, and you have to carefully drag the slider to the desired position.

File > open Directory will add all the files in the directory to the Playlist, which can be accessed from View > Playlist. To alter display settings like contrast, brightness etc., got to Settings > Extended GUI > Video. Enable the settings for the changes to have and effect on the movie.

Under the Extended GUI window you can also find the Audio Equalizer. Here also the equalizer needs to be enabled for the alterations to have an effect. A slicker, but less functional, GUI can be used by switching interfaces from the Settings menu. For routine use, the skins2 GUI is recommended, but it doesn’t remember the setting, so you will need to apply it every time you start it.

VLC offers a lot more functionality than any other media player, that puts it in a class of its own. Its inbuilt video encoder lets you crop those parts of a movie that you like. To do this: while playing the file, go to Settings > Bookmarks option. Add bookmarks at the start and end points of the range you would like to save. You can create sets of start and points that you want to extract. Once all ranges have been identified, select each start and end bookmark pair and click on Extract.

This will cause the transcoding wizard to pop up. You can choose to compress the audio and video or keep the original format. Depending on the audio video codecs chosen, the container format options change. Finally select a location and a filename (an extension is not automatically appended) and then click on save.

The only way to know the progress of the transcoding is to look at the movie progress bar. And there is no pop up informing you that the process has ended, so once the progress bar stops, wait a few seconds more and then assume that the process has completed.

VLC includes a Wizard to ease the transcoding and streaming. The wizard can be opened from File > Wizard menu. In the streaming/transcoding Wizard dialog box that opens, select “Stream to network”, after selecting the relevant option, click on Next and choose the relevant video file.

Next, select the protocol to be use for the stream. RTP (Real Time Transport Protocol) can utilize bandwidth better than HTTP. Select the IP address of the machine you want to stream to. If you want to stream to more than one PC, use RTP Mulitcast and set the IP range accordingly. If you would rather people connect to your IP to see the stream, you can do that by choosing the HTTP protocol. In this case, the stream is available at http://your ip:8080 by default. The port number can be changed, if necessary, in the destination address box.

For streaming there is no need of modifying any other parameters, just click on “Next” till the Wizard finishes. Any person wanting to view the stream can use VLC for the purpose. Using File > Open Network Stream option, the stream can be viewed.

The wizard also helps in the transcoding process. After selecting a file to transcode, most of the steps are similar to the ones described before while transcoding a part of the file.