If you have a computer you need a media player application to play your audio/video files. Problem is not all media players are alike or as capable and odds are eventually your will come across files it cannot play. Which usually mean you have to install even more applications like Quicktime, Realplayer or have to hunt down and install special codecs like H.264 or DiVX to play some of your files.

As time goes by you usually find that you need to install quite a few programs and codecs onto your computer to play everything and that just doesn’t seem right to me.

So why not use the greatest all-around media player out there instead? I do.

VLC Media Player is the best out there. It not only plays just about any multimedia file you can throw at it but it can also encode audio and video and stream multimedia files across networks too! And that’s barely scratching the surface of what VLC can do, it’s list of features is longer than this article!

It’s free, open source, uses far less memory or resources than other media players (such as Apple’s Quicktime or Window’s Media player) and is the most platform-independent player out there. VLC runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS, Syllable, BSD, MorphOS, Solaris and the Sharp Zaurus line of PDAs. (Pssst… it’s ok if you don’t know what most of those are, there’s no test)

To say VLC is a better media player just doesn’t do this wonderful cross-platform program justice. It slices! It dices! It julienne’s!

VLC not only plays popular media types like flash (flv), mp3, avi, mp4, quicktime, real player, Windows media files (wma & wmv) and DiVX (to name a tiny bit of the files it supports) but it’s also a fantastic DVD player as well!

I don’t like installing a bunch of special programs and codecs on my computer just to open my multimedia files, do you? VLC is all you need. Try it, you’ll like it. (Mikey liked it).