Austin Computer Arts Newsletter - Playing Video with VLC Media Player

Austin Computer Arts Newsletter, February, 2010
This Month's Tip: How to Play Video Files on Your Computer

You've listened to music on a computer, and (probably) know you're listening to an MP3 file. And you've watched a movie on a computer, but (probably) had no clue what type of file you're watching. This is not because you're a computer dummy.

This is because unlike the ubiquitous iTunes/MP3 confederacy in the world of digital music, there are dozens of types of video files, formats and players out there. Chaos yet reigns in the video player world! Will Free Enterprise find a solution?

No, public benevolence has beaten it to the punch.

VLC media player (http://www.videolan.org) is a simple, stable and free application that can play any computer video file on any computer. You don't have to understand video files and formats, nor install any extra "codecs." You don't have to buy anything, nor are you ever asked to. Other video players will play most, but never all formats, and you have to install "codecs" in your computer's system to make them work.

VLC is the most full-featured, stable, logical and universal video player around. VideoLAN is a project, run by volunteers, backed-up by a non-profit organization, which produces free and open source software for multimedia, released under the GNU General Public License. Though VLC's basic interface is simple and easy to grasp, it boasts hundreds of customizable features under the hood. But let's just focus on the basics. And by the way, this is about how to play movie files on your computer; acquiring them is a topic for another day.

How to get started with VLC:

Download and install VLC from http://www.videolan.org
Open your video file with VLC and watch it.

That’s all there is to it. The Windows VLC installer will set VLC to open all video files in the future with VLC by default; no configuration needed. I would also encourage you to look under the hood, you'll find some useful tools in the Preference settings. However, (and here's an ironic twist) Macintosh users will need a little help setting it to automatically open your video files, so here you go...

Macintosh Users:

Just installing VLC won't automatically set your Mac to open video files in VLC by default. So the first time you use it, you'll need to tell your Mac to open all video files in the future with VLC. The steps:

From the Finder, find a video file you want to open with VLC.
select it (click on it ONE time)
Go to the File Menu and select Get Info.
In the window that appears, click on the arrow next to Open With.
Click on the pull-down menu and select VLC.
Click Change All...
A window appears asking you "Are you sure you want to change all similar documents..."
Click Continue.
Close the Get Info window and open the file. It will now, and forever, open in VLC.

Here's a video of the steps:

IMPORTANT: You will need to do this for every "type" of video file you want to open in VLC, but you will have to do it only ONCE for every file type. In the instructions above, we changed all "AVI" files (files that end in ".avi") to open in VLC by default. This is the most common high-quality video file, but you'll these also: ".mkv", ".mpg", ".wmv", ".iso", ".mp4", and ".m4v" are all common. Simply follow the same procedure above for every file type. If you are not sure, just make sure the file's icon is changed to VLCs icon (with the little warning cone).