The free video player that plays (almost) any video file

Digital video has become common in the workplace. At work, I often create promotional videos, training videos and videos of company events and distribute them to my colleagues.

Have you ever received a video file from a colleague that you can't play? Try downloading VLC (http://www.videolan.org), the free open-source video player for Windows, Mac and Linux. It plays almost any video file, including AVI, MOV (QuickTime), FLV (Flash Video), MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.

VLC even plays video files encoded with the new MPEG-4 H.264 AVC codec, which is most suitable for compressing large high-definition video files. On my notebook, VLC plays high-definition H.264 video files much more smoothly than QuickTime.

For advanced users, VLC offers a feature to convert videos from one format to another, also known as video transcoding. VLC is a prime example of a very useful free open source tool.

Note that the use of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 codecs (including H.264) may be subjected to licence fees, even though the codecs may be part of an open-source tool like VLC. If you're thinking of using VLC in a product or commercial project, contact MPEG LA for licensing details.

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Lee Lup Yuen

Lee Lup Yuen is passionate about mobile phones and PDAs, as he is constantly buying new gadgets and programming them in J2ME, .NET, Symbian and AppForge. He has developed commercial applications with mobile technologies like SMS, MMS, WAP, 3G video streaming and location-based services.