It’s also a great choice for streaming media of any kind.
VLC is a good choice if you format your machine and still want DVD playback (as DVD codecs are normally proprietary and difficult to come by). No additional installs or codecs are required.
The developer also claims that VLC can also record live TV from a decoder card and act as a sort of mini-DVR in that respect I was unable to verify this on my test PC, which lacks a TV decoder card.Īnd the nicest thing is that VLC is small, at about 17MB, and is entirely self contained after installation. Other new features in 1.0.0 are the ability to play back a single frame at a time, the ability to pause instantly(whereas before you always lost a couple of frames that way) and Blu-Ray and HD audio support for the first time. Also, be sure and check the box to get rid of the DVD menus, otherwise all you’ll be streaming is the main DVD menu in an endless loop. You’ll need a little knowledge of network administration to do this, though–it might be easier just to stream to a file, though it can take a couple of hours to get the whole thing. You can set up VLC to stream media from a file or from a DVD as a server, and then another client can stream that media, without having to encode the file first. VLC can also act as both a streaming server and client. Note that the very newest DVDs may have copy protection that might prevent VLC from streaming in this way, so you’ll have to experiment. You’ll have to have some good network bandwidth in order to stream it in that case, but at least it’s feasible for most DVDs.
The default encoding is pretty rough, but you can fine-tune it to be DVD quality. I then played the file on a laptop on the network running VLC, even before the host computer was finished transcoding the DVD to the file. I was able to take a Sony DVD movie, Spider-Man 2 (Sony movies being notoriously difficult to decode), and stream it to VLC’s. Yes, that means CSS-protected content as well. The most important addition to VLC 1.0.0, and one that will garner the most attention, is the ability to easily record all media on the fly.