VLC media player for the Mac
December 23, 2008 by Sukrit Dhandhania
There are a hundred different formats that media lives in these days. For music as well and movies we end up with various formats. In such cases you want your computer to have a media player that supports all or most of these formats out of the box. VLC player does just that. VLC, which stands for VideoLAN, is an open source media player for Windows, Linux, and the Mac, among other platforms.
To download VLC head over to the for VLC project’s website. Download the latest release for the Mac. Get the “dmg” image. Mount the image after the download completes (if it does not mount automatically). Then drag and drop VLC from the mounted folder to your computer’s “Applications” directory. Launch VLC by double clicking on the VLC Player icon in the “Applications” directory.
VLC Player is quite well designed and should be rather easy to get used to. I’ll share some basic tips to get you started with using it. First, let’s see how you can access your media files and play them with VLC.
To open a file or a disc you need to first go to the VLC menu and click on “File” and then “Open File”. A window such as the one in the image below will open. Click on “Browse…” and navigate to the location of the file. Select the media file you want to play with VLC and click “Open”. Click OK. The file should now begin playing.
Similarly you can watch a movie off a CD or a DVD. To do that click on “File” -> “Open Disc…”, or use the “Command + D” keyboard shortcut. In the window that open pick the disc you want to play and click “Okay”.
There is also a “Quick Open File” option in the menu, under the “File” menu. This allows you to skip the “File Open” window and directory open the file. It’s quite useful.
The way I usually play a media file is by directly launching them from the Finder. To do this navigate to the directory where you media file is and then “Control + Click” on the file. This will launch a menu with a few options. Choose the “Open With” option and then click on “VLC” in the menu that opens up after that.
If VLC is not available in the list select open with “Other”. Navigate to where VLC Player is installed on your computer and click open. You can also make VLC the default player to open these kinds of files. To do this check on the “Always Open With” option when you open Finder to find VLC Player.
One other thing - if you’re not entirely enamored with the default “pylon” icon(s) that VLC uses, see this post for a tutorial on adding more “stylish” icons.
There no other app like it - it plays almost everything and does it well.
Tired of worrying about DVD zones? Don’t worry - just use VLC.
Tired of weird kinds of avi’s that don’t work for mysterious reasons? Don’t worry - just use VLC.
I have been using VLC for a long time now, it’s nice to know that we don’t need to depend on M$ to make a wmv/wma player for the Mac, VLC plays most Windows Media file very nicely and of course most other files too.