Documentation:Play HowTo/Basic Use

VLC User Guide

Quick Start Guide
Installing VLC
History
Usage
Interface
Open Media
Audio
Video
Playback
Playlist
Subtitles
Video and Audio Filters
Snapshots
Hotkeys
Uninstalling VLC
Troubleshooting
Advanced usage
Using VLC inside a webpage
Command line
Alternative Interfaces
Misc
Appendix
Building Pages for the HTTP Interface
Format String
Building Lua Playlist Scripts

View this alone

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.