Back in the olden days of computing (6 or 7 years ago) playing a particular video on a Mac could sometimes be quite a challenge. In order to play a certain type of video file, you would need a specific video player to go with it, and in the computing world there are many, many different video formats! There’s Flash Video, Raw DV, Windows Media Video, Real, MPEG 1, 2, and 4, DivX, AVI, Matroska (MKV), Xvid, 3ivX, and many others. All of them would either require a special player or a particular type of “codec” (coder/decoder – kind of similar to a plugin) in order for your computer to know how to translate that video file into something that you could actually watch and enjoy.
On the Mac, OS X tends to stick to a small handful of video formats, all of which QuickTime does a pretty good job of working with. However, if any of you readers out there have friends with Windows-based PCs, or even certain brands of video cameras, you may be aware that playing videos that they send you is not always an easy task. This is where something like VLC Player comes in.
VLC Player is a lightweight, free, and open source application that has the ability to read just about any common video format in the known computing world. Not only can it play all of the video formats that were mentioned previously (and more!), it also has the ability to play from streaming video sources as well as close to two dozen different audio formats.
While the latest version of VLC for Mac requires an Intel based Mac and OS X 10.5 or newer, if you have an older computer (even one that is PowerPC based) you can still find versions from the downloads page that will support your machine.
If you’ve ever found yourself stuck trying to play a video that QuickTime simply refuses to touch, do yourself a favor and try out VLC!