How to play any video, audio or music file

Someone send you an audio or video file but it won’t play. There’s software that can play any video, audio or music file, pretty much.

VLC is a free, reliable and widely used audio and video player https://www.videolan.org/ it’s available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android and Linux.

Unlike the in-built video/music players from Microsoft and Apple, VLC supports a very wide range of formats.

Instead of messing about installing codecs and other nonsense, VLC comes with all that ready to use.

Current VLC supported format list

It’ll also play from DVD, Audio CD, webcams, network cameras, DVB (Satellite TV)  and many other acronyms.

If VLC can’t play the media file, the file is either faulty or the format so obscure that it’ll be hard to find a player.

VLC’s only weakness is the library management for large music collections.  For that use a dedicated player program. Start with the music player than comes with Windows, Mac etc.  Those players are designed to get people to sign up for streaming services, but can play music stored on your computer or device.

We’ve used VLC for many years, especially for playing videos but also audio files in formats that Microsoft or Apple don’t support.

VLC for Windows, Mac or Linux

Go to the VLC download page, it should detect your operating system and select the correct download.  Or click on the OS icon to choose another version of VLC.

VLC for iPhone / iPad

VLC for iPhone/iPad, go to the App Store

VLC for Android devices

VLC for Android is on Google Play.

 

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