Love digital audio and video? You'll love VLC Media Player!

I've got to admit that I absolutely cringe when I see folks play digital audio and video with bloated proprietary software like Windows Media Player, Real Player and Apple Quicktime.

It's loaded with ads trying to get you to buy various digital media content or to purchase subscriptions for online services.

Often it "phones home to Mama" reporting what file you just played even though it's just a file that's on your local hard drive. It bugs you to install updates and upgrades and often won't work until you've dealt with the latest dialogue box that's popped up on your screen.

Me, I just want to play the bloody file or audio/video stream! Leave me alone!

Thankfully, there's one programme that allows me to do just that...VLC Media Player! You can download it from http://videolan.org/vlc .

"VLC Media Player" is "free as in freedom, free as in free beer" and is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

VLC is available for just about any operating system you can think of including Microsoft Windows, MacOSX, GNU/Linux, various versions of Unix, Syllable and even a more or less obsolete operating system like BeOS.

VLC will play just about any audio or video file or stream that you might like to throw at it. You'll find a list of what's supported in the most current version (0.9) here. The only major file format that it doesn't support is Real Audio and Video...but if you're a Windows user, there's a free software solution here.

It's a small rather stripped down rather "unflashy" application that won't overload your computer. But it does the most important thing. It plays the bloody file without bugging you!

While it's not obvious, if you poke around inside the menus you'll find links to hundreds of "Shoutcast" radio, TV and podcast streams. Just go to "View", "Playlist", then in the dialogue box go to "Manage", and go to "Services Discovery". Exploring all of these Shoutcast streams will keep you busy for weeks!

If you're a bit geeky, you can even use VLC Media Player as a streaming server.

One of the other cool things about free software is that folks are free to build new software applications using software code from another application. That's exactly what's been done with the "Miro" internet TV application. It was built using the source code from VLC. But I'll leave that for a future post!

In the meantime, have fun with VLC Media Player!