Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use

Note: this documentation is for versions 0.9 and newer and is under construction.

For simple help with 0.9 see VLC for dummies: an introduction to VLC. For older versions please see and Basic Use.

About VLC media player

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3 and ogg. It also plays DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming networks. In addition to playing audio and video files, VLC media player provides additional formats which can be played and customized.

VLC media player was initially known as VideoLAN Client. However, in recent years, the software has also become an extremely powerful server to stream live and on-demand video in several formats to the intranet network and the Internet.

It started as a student project at the French École Centrale, Paris, but is now a worldwide project with developers from more than 20 countries.

VLC is built in a modular way. This means that you can choose from a range of different modules to decide how to control VLC and how to display the video output.

Note: The screenshots are taken from the MS Windows XP version. On other operating systems they might appear slightly different.

Understanding the VLC interface

See Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use/Interface

Audio

See Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use/Audio

Video

See Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use/Video

Playback

See Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use/Playback

Playlist

See Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use/Playlist

Subtitles

See Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use/Subtitles

Video and audio filters

See Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use/Video and Audio Filters

Snapshots (aka, screenshots)

See Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use/Snapshots

Hotkeys

See also: QtHotkeys, HotKeys, How to set global hotkeys.

See Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use/Hotkeys

Basic troubleshooting

See Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use/Basic troubleshooting