VLC Media Player: One billion downloads and counting
As Perian begins its slow farewell comes news that world’s best loved open-source media player has hit an important milestone — one billion downloads. The odd things about the story is that VideoLAN, the group behind VLC Media Player, didn’t start counting until 2005 and they haven’t reckoned Linux downloads into the total.
Why odd? Because VLC development and distribution began way, way back in 1996 and VLC is a mainstay on Linux. That is, whereas Mac and Windows folks like it a lot, on Linux VLC is the default playback app in many distros and it’s by far the best solution available.
Nevertheless (the lack of plausible accountability aside), that VLC Media Player will open and play just about any video or, for that matter, audio file is a notion that’s catching on and momentum has increased since the release of version 2.0 — it’s a truly Mac-like app with great features.
Besides if you want to play a movie downloaded from somewhere encoded with some bizarro codec, then you need VLC.
Are you loving VLC Media Player?
via The Verge
Related posts:
— Perian calling it quits after final update
— Better than Skype? LINE takes off overseas
— The Oatmeal tries to buy Game of Thrones
— What’s new in iTunes 10.6.1
— Toast 11.0.5 is here for real
Great player but lacks the “jump” feature…10 second advance.
I have been using VLC Media Player for many years on my Macs both at home and at work. For me it was just great to find a player, free yet, that would play all those proprietary codecs that otherwise wouldn’t play on the Mac. I’m glad to see VideoLAN getting the recognition they so richly deserve.
It was funny to watch the SLOOOOOOW increment of the version number as it marched to 1.0. Indeed, as it has added codecs I use other players less and less, and wonder what the deal with Apple is.
One of Apple’s biggest mis-steps was Indeo 5 video. For YEARS the only way to play those videos was to fire up classic under OS X, as the QuickTime plug-in would not work under OS X. When Apple dropped support for classic I began to consider using a VM running Windows just to convert those files. For many years VLC’s compatibility chart said that it was never going to support that codec… until they suddenly did.
Bless the VLC coders, and long live VLC!
I used QT with Perian (farewell) for just about anything. However I use VLC with Fairmount to mount DVDs as unencrypted folders on my desktop for various use.
[...] links weren’t available, but look for those over the coming hours. Related posts: — VLC Media Player: One billion downloads and counting — VLC Media Player 2.0.1 adds MxPEG support, tweaks features, brings fixes — VLC Media [...]
Leave your response!
Recent Posts
Popular Posts
The ROCR on the web
Most Commented
Most Viewed
Powered by WordPress | Entries (RSS) | Comments (RSS) | Privacy Policy