VLC Player 0.8.4 Review

VLC player 0.8.4 was released a few days back for windows and other OSes. Here is a review about VLC player..

VLC player Overview:
VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

VLC player is my favourite player as:

- It dont need any Codecs to play any file. This is the single reason that many use this program.
- Plays a variety of files (inc. DVD’s and .mov files).
- Plays .bin/.cue without converting them to VCD/DVD.
- It supports variety of OSes.
- It’s Free!
- Now it can get things to stream across network. Learn more
- Advanced Subtitles options.
- And much more!

What’s new?
Here is some of the major changes that I noticed:

• The look and feel of the program has changed a lot. The icons have been changed. Here is a image as to how it looks:
  
  The icons are little bigger and looks better than what it used to look.
• The volume can now be increased upto 400%. Thats a good news, as most of the .avi which are Xvid encoded may have less volume while played and this volume boast is good change.
• I have noticed that, while playing DVDs in the older versions, it don’t shows the correct run time. Now that is fixed.. this is a small bug but it is irritating for someone like me who watch DVDs in VLC player.
• Now we can have skin 2 (fixed) and wxWidgets other than the default interface.
• As the major bug that were fixed was skin2 interface and volume down irritation bug

These are the changes that I found out, but see the changelog for the complete changes.
Change log ( 0.8.2 to 0.8.4)

Still some work is yet to be done
The seek bar and seeking the file to a place is still not proper. This problem is really irritaing while playing DVDs. We can just seek to just one chapter at a time.

The CPU usage is high and maybe the developers can try and make it as light as possible and take cue from Foobar which is light on the PC and still offers many functionality.

We don’t have support for Real media files (.ram/.rm, etc..) due to copyright issues, it’s not really required for VLC to support it but atleast this can discourage the usage of Real player alternative which is illegal and Real should take cue from Apple who given the right to use the quicktime files (.mov/.mp4, etc..) along with VLC player.

Now it seems that the developers have copyright and other issues with European countries and may not be developed. Hope they get out of the mess…

I wonder how long it will take for them to release 0.1 version.. still we are stuck in this 0.8.X

Adding Subtitles with VLC player:
There is an option to add subtitles as well. But you need to play the file by starting the VLC player and not clicking on the movie file as such.
It offers many other advanced features as frame delay, font size, and much more. The screenshot is shown below:

The only trouble is that in case we play any widescreen movie, the texts comes in the playing area and not in the black blank space below.
Coming soon: A Guide to use subtitles and working with them. Watch my blog for more!

VLC Player 0.8.4 for Windows | VLC Player 0.8.4 for Other OSes

Related Posts:
Playing media files without any issues (no more codec problems)