Noow is a pretty new competitor to the media playback game. Its claim is that it can play back HD video with amazing quality. Lets see how it stacks up against VLC.

The desktop applications

Both are applications you will need to download and install onto your machine. The look of Noow is clean and modern.

There are options in the left sidebar to video sources like Hulu and YouTube. Also near the bottom of that same sidebar, there are some links to podcasts.

VLC has a more plain interface. It is not as stylish as Noow’s player, but has everything you typically access right there in the open.

Noow media types played

Noow can play MPEG, AVI, DivX, H.264, Flash Video, QuickTime, Windows Media. There is not a full list of file types anywhere I could see.

While installing Noow, you may want choose custom install so you can turn on support for QuickTime, MP3, AVI, MPEG, Windows media files. These are not checked by default.

VLC media types played

VLC has a full list of media types it can play. If you take a look at the file types, I doubt there are many out there that VLC won’t play.

Having the ability to play a specific media type can take a lot of the guess work out of deciding on the player you want to use.

Noow special features

Playback location – If you need to stop a movie or video before you finish it, Noow will remember the location where you stopped and automatically start you there when you open the file again.

RSS feeds – Get the latest video from your favorite site using the RSS feed option.

Torrent files – You can use files from Bit Torrent

Space – You can set aside a certain space on your hard drive for your downloads and be notified when it is full.

VLC special features

Stream – You can stream your audio and video files to other devices. This can be super cool if you set up an old computer as a media server.

Remote – Your Android device can be used as a remote to control your media playback.

Appearance – You can download different skins to change the look of the player window.

Conclusion

I am still leaning toward VLC. My reasoning is, I am using Windows 8 for most things recently and Noow was a bit choppy playing video. I don’t expect all of the applications to work perfectly on a new OS. Noow worked great for me in XP. VLC has been a great all around media player for as long as it has been around. They usually adapt to new formats very quickly.

What kinds of features help you choose which media player to use?

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1. Fix Audio/Video/Subtitle Sync Problems

One of the most annoying things that can happen on video playback is when the audio and video tracks do not sync up properly. Sometimes it’s a result of bad encoding software, sometimes it’s a result of a mistake by the person doing the encoding, but it’s always annoying. VLC feels your pain and includes a tool to adjust the delay for the audio and/or subtitle tracks to let you adjust things as needed. Just open Tools -> Track Synchronization to make your adjustments.

2. Watermarks/Overlays

Sometimes you may need to place some text or watermark into your video display (particularly when transcoding), and you don’t need a video editor suite to accomplish this. VLC’s got that too. Like some of our other tips, this can be found in Tools -> Effects and Filters, but this time under the Video Effects tab under Vout/Overlay.

If you want a graphic instead of plain text, you can do that with the Logo tab in the same section.

3. Control Playback Through the Web

If you’ve got your videos hooked up to play through a home theater PC, or just like to do remote control, you can command VLC from anywhere through its network interfaces for Telnet or Web. Just open View -> Add Interface -> Web Interface. It starts a small web server (you may need to adjust your system firewall settings to allow it) which can be accessed on port 8080. The web interface will let you start, stop, and set current playback and even adjust volume just as if you were clicking the buttons on the player window itself.

4. Mouse Gestures

Many people find mouse gestures to be a more natural way to interact with a computer than using buttons, and VLC has got those people taken care of as well. If you’re not familiar with them, mouse gestures let you use various click-and-drag motions to tell the application what to do. In web browsers, for example, you might drag the mouse anywhere on the screen from right to left to go back, instead of moving up to the corner for the button. It may not sound like much but many mouse gesture users will say it adds up.

To enable this feature, go to View -> Add Interface -> Mouse Gestures. You may need to restart VLC for the changes to take effect. The list of supported gestures can be found here.

Conclusion

As always, VLC delivers more than expected from a media player. There have been times when this author has run into some type of problem with a video and thought “I bet VLC is clever enough to have something for this…” and most of the time, I’ve been right. In case you can’t tell, I’m a fan.

Related Posts:

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In this tutorial, we will show you how to get VLC-shares up and running in your Ubuntu machine. VLC-shares is available for Windows as well and the installation and configuration instruction is pretty easy and straightforward, so we will not touch on that.

Installing VLC-shares in Ubuntu

First of all, go to the VLC-shares website and download the “vlc-shares_0.5.*.zip” file. The latest version (as of this post) is version 0.5.3.

Extract the zip file to your Home folder. You should see a folder “vlc-shares”.

Open a terminal. We are going to install the necessary software.

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5 zend-framework zend-framework-bin vlc php5-sqlite php5-cli vlc ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-52 libavcodec-unstripped-52

Next, we are going to enable apache mod_rewrite

sudo a2enmod rewrite

It will prompt you to restart apache. Ignore that for a moment. We will do that later.

Open Zend Framework config file:

sudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/zend-framework.ini

Remove the “;” in front of the second sentence.

Save and close the file.

Back to your terminal, we are going to change the apache config file.

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

Scroll down the file until you see the part “<Directory /var/www/>“. Underneath that line of code, change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All.

Save and close the file.

(Assuming you have earlier unpacked the vlc-shares.zip file to your Home folder) We are going to move the VLC-shares folder to the apache folder.

sudo cp -R ~/vlc-shares /var/www
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/vlc-shares
sudo chmod a+rwx -R /var/www/vlc-shares/data

Lastly, we are going to restart the apache.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

We are almost there. Now, open up a browser and navigate to “http://localhost/vlc-shares/public” (without the quote). You should see the installation dashboard. Go ahead to select all the plugins and click the “Start Installation” button.

The installation shouldn’t take more than a minute. Once it is done, you will see the configuration page. Ignore that (the default configuration should work fine). At the top, click the first Home icon. This will bring you to the Home page.

We are done with your Ubuntu installation. The next step is to configure your Android phone.

Accessing VLC-shares from Android

Before we start the streaming, we need to install a media player app capable of playing stream video. I have tried out RockPlayer and MVideo Player and they failed. VPlayer is the one that works.

Install VPlayer from the market.

Note: If you have firewall installed, remember to configure it to allow incoming connection before proceeding.

If your Android phone is connected to the same WIFI network as your Ubuntu computer

Open the browser and enter the URL: http://your-ubuntu-lan-address/vlc-share/public. Replace “your-ubuntu-lan-address” with the physical LAN address of your computer. In this case, my computer has the address 192.168.0.131, so on my Android browser, I enter “http://192.168.0.131/vlc-shares/public”

Note: On Ubuntu machine, you can find out the IP address of your computer by right-clicking the network manager applet and select Connection Information

If your Android phone is connected via remote network

You have to enable the port forwarding feature in your router. We won’t touch on that in this tutorial. Refer to your router’s user manual for the instruction (or get more detail here).

On your Android browser, you should see the same dashboard interface.

Tap on the “Browse” button.

If you want to stream video from the Ubuntu computer, select the “Shared Folder” option and navigate to the folder where you store your videos. Select the video you want to stream and tap “Start VLC Stream”.

Select “Go to Stream”. When prompted, select “VPlayer”.

That’s it. Enjoy your video.

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Here we have gathered a list of media players that can play (almost) every other formats.

1. VLC Media Player

VLC is one player that need little or no introduction. If there is any media files that you can’t play, the first thing you must think of is VLC. From media formats like MP3, AC3, MPEG-3 to MPEG-4, H.264, DivX etc, VLC supports them all. It can also be used to convert media files from one format to another, and improve the compression ratio. It can act as a streaming server and you can see online videos using IPv4 (mostly used) or IPv6 protocol.

VLC is free to download/use and exists for almost every platforms, including the iPad and iPhone.

Supported OS: Almost all Operating Systems.

2. Media Player Classic

Media Player Classic is exclusively meant for Windows. Though it looks similar to Media Player v6.4, it has many additional features. It can even be used to implement a Home Theatre. Removal of tearing in video is another feature. It also supports EVR (Enhanced Video Renderer). Creation of minidump when MPC HC crashes, shuttle PN31 remote control support, multi-monitor configuration, pixel shader to convert BT601 – BT701, YV12 Chroma Up sampling pixel shader are some other features. Some of the supported audio and video formats are WAV, WMA, OGG, AU, AIF, AIFC, MOV, SND, AIFF, MIDI, MPEG, MPG, MP2, AC3, DTS, ASX, MP3, M3U, PLS, ASF, WM, WMA, WMV, AVI, CDA, JPEG, JPG, GIF, WAX, PNG, BMP, D2V, VOB, MP4, SWF, QT, FLV.

Supported OS: Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7

3. Moovida

Moovida is more than just a simple media player. It is a feature rich software that allows you to organize your digital media in a slick way. It offers enriched media library with which you can import media from local folders, network devices or even from the internet. The Videos Galore feature supports a wide variety of formats including DivX, avi, wmv, mkv, asf, flv, mov, h264 and ogg, Moovida is available in over 20 languages. Moovida Immersed is a new feature which will support remote control navigation on your HDTV. 

Supported OS: Windows and Linux

4. GOM Player

This player supports almost all CODECs and hence offers support for varied formats. In case you require an extra CODEC, GOM player will automatically direct you to the place where you can get one. It can play AVI files with broken index. It has a strong sub-title support with the major formats being SMI, SRT, RT, SUB (with IDX). You can create and work with your own playlists. It supports playlists similar to M3U, PLS and ASX. Screen Capture feature is also allowed and supports advanced features like customizing color, contrast and brightness. Some of the supported formats are gom, dat, avi, divx, k3g, asf, wm, wmx, wmp, wmv, wvx, ogm, mpeg, mpg, mpe, m1v, m2v, vob, mp4, 3gp, lmp4, skm, dmskm, mkv and ifo.

Supported OS : Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/NT

5. SMplayer

MPlayer is best known in Linux world, used as the backend for various media player. SMPlayer is the implementation of Mplayer in Windows. It comes with a simple GUI that allows you to control the functionality of MPlayer. One of the most interesting features of SMPlayer – it remembers the settings of all files you play. If you leave your movie half way, the next time you resume, it will restore to the same point you left it, and with the same settings: audio track, subtitles, volume…

Supported OS: Windows

6. KM Player

It lets you play almost everything easily. It can easily be customized. You can adjust the visualizations, add plug-ins and change its playback options. It supports a wide range of audio/video formats so that once installed, you won’t have to go for another player. KMPlayer has a small desktop footprint. It also sports a minimalist interface that makes video playback quick and hassle-free. Some of the supported formats are VCD, DVD, Ogg, MPEG-1/2/4,  AVI, MKV,  3GP, OGM, WMV, Real Media and QuickTime .

Supported OS : Win2000/XP/2003/Vista/7

8. K-Lite Codec Pack

If all you want is the ability to play various media formats and not to install a new media player, then K-Lite Codec Pack is the one software that you are looking for.

The K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs files required to play all the popular audio and video formats, and even several less common formats. It integrates itself to the Windows Media Player so you can play (almost) any files with WMP.

It is always a good thing to be pampered with choices. Even when the Windows Media Player doesn’t recognize the file format, it doesn’t have to be the end of World for you. The above list of media player + codecs should get you on with your life. What other method do you use to play that file that is not recognized by your media player?

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My mission over the past few months has been to find the best apps that I can use to control my PC with my phone. I have tested a number of free and paid apps and put together a great list of apps that makes the life of a couch potato that much easier.

Over the next few articles I will highlight some of the apps that have really made my life much easier.

Like most people my age, I love watching videos on my PC and my player of choice is of course the Swiss Army Knife of media players: VLC”.

VLC is a versatile application and there are a number of ways of controlling it from your phone. However, my preferred method has been the free app VLC Remote. It does the basic tasks of volume change, play/pause, forward and rewind easily and without any great difficulty setting up.

1. Set-up your Computer

First, you will have to download the VLC player from their website.

Note: I have tested the Android app with VLC version 1.1.0 and above.

Before installing the Android app VLC Remote, you must first make some changes to the default VLC application on your computer to enable your phone to properly detect VLC.

Open VLC and click on Tools > Preferences. Next, select All under Show settings.

This launches VLC’s advanced settings. Now select, Interface > Main interfaces. In the Main interfaces window select “HTTP remote control interface.”

2. Set-Up VLC Remote

Website | AppBrain | Market Link

Once you have configured VLC on your computer you can download VLC Remote onto your Android phone.

First, launch VLC on your computer. Unless VLC is running on your computer, the VLC Remote app will not work.

Next, launch VLC Remote on your phone. If it is able to detect your computer, the app will automatically pick up the name of the video file that is being played. However, in my experience it has never automatically detected my computer and I must add my IP address manually.

To connect to your computer, first, click on Menu and Settings.

In the Settings menu first ensure you are connected to your home wireless network. Once connected, click on “Add VLC server”.

In the “Add VLC server” type in your local IP address (for example 192.168.1.101) and leave the Port as the default 8080.

You should now be connected to your computer’s VLC application.

3. Features

I like VLC Remote because it is a simple that does not overflow with features but it has just enough to make media consumption easy.

All the basic settings can be accessed from the main interface.

Clicking on the Browse Media button launches a file browser that shows you all the files/folders on your computer. However, VLC must be running on your computer to actually be able to browse your media.

If you have all your media files in a specific folder you can set that particular folder as Home. To do this hold down the home button until you see “Home set to [folder]”.

You can select any media file (that is compatible with VLC) and have it play on your computer.

4. Conclusion

The best thing about this particular app and using the HTTP interface is that you do not need to worry about messing around with your router or firewall settings. So, long as you enable the HTTP interface the app will “just work”. In fact this app has become indispensable. I can now sit on my bed or couch, watch videos on my computer and I don’t have to get up to change the volume, play a new video or play/pause the video. Essentially, this is like a remote control for your computer.

There are a number of VLC remote apps in the Android marketplace, let us know which one you use to control VLC.

Image credit: purpcheese

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Video File Conversion

We’ve touched on video encoding with VLC here before, but VLC has been updated since then and the process is FAR simpler now. To convert a video file from one format to another, choose Media -> Advanced Open File. Make sure you pick Advanced, as the simple file opener dialog does not display conversion options. Add your file or files using the Add button, and once finished move the mouse cursor to the arrow next to the Play button to choose Convert.

At the second dialog, simply choose your output format and filename, click Start, and you’re all set.

DVD and Audio CD Ripping

While playing DVDs is common enough in VLC, many people don’t think of it when looking for a ripper. There are certainly more feature-rich DVD rippers out there, but VLC can always be counted on if you’re unwilling or unable to use a dedicated ripper program. To start, you use a process very similar to the Encoding section above. Click Media -> Open Disc to get the disc screen, and you’ll find buttons at the top to choose the DVD or Audio options.

Choose Convert instead of Play Then simply choose output name and type, just like the Video File Conversion section above.

Jump to Time

This is a great example of a tiny, simple feature that can come in very handy. If you find yourself hitting the wall in Hour 9 of your Star Wars marathon, you can take note of the current play progress and jump back there tomorrow once you’ve had a chance to eat, sleep, and rethink your life. Just tell VLC where you left off and it’ll jump right back.

Last.fm Scrobbling

While mainly for video, VLC is a fairly capable music player as well. If you’re a Last.fm user, you can use VLC to submit your tracks. The option to enable this is in the same place as the normalizer function, Tools > Preferences > Audio.

Automatic Audio Normalization

Many people and programs who encode video don’t always respect good practices when it comes to audio volume. There are few things more annoying while running a video playlist than to have to jump out of your chair and crank down the volume because someone didn’t respect decibel limits. Fortunately, VLC includes a live audio normalizer that detects and suppresses sudden jumps in sound. To access it, choose Tools -> Preferences -> Audio.

It’s worth noting that there is a slight delay in the normalizer. If you’re watching a video where a gunfight breaks out, the first shot might be missed by the normalizer but it will kick in shortly after. Also, it seems that if you enable this function while a video is playing, you will need to restart the video for the normalizer to take effect.

If you’ve got a useful tip for getting the most out of this excellent application, let us know in the comments below.

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Mac OS X has the share of multimedia players to choose from, and Apple itself has already provide Mac users (as well as Windows users) with Quicktime – a great general formats multimedia player if I may say so. It should be enough to cater our multimedia need. But there are formats still unsupported by Quicktime making it a little less than perfect.

Here are two free add-ons you can use to complete Quicktime.

1. Perian

This little app is said to be the “Swiss army knife” for Quicktime because it adds the ability to play many more previously unsupported multimedia formats such as: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, VFW, MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, (still following me?), and many others. The complete list is available at their site, should you be so curious.

Personally, the one ability Perian gives to Quicktime that I like most is the support for SSA/ASS and SRT files. That, my friend, is the ability to show subtitle for a movie. If you have a movie file and compatible SRT file with the exact similar name within the same folder, the subtitle will appear on the screen simultaneously with the movie.

This is very helpful for those with hearing disability, or those whose native language is different from the one used in the movie. Few of my friends use the subtitle ability to learn different languages.

Surely not every movie comes with subtitle file, but you can try finding the SSA/ASS of SRT files on the net. If you find the compatible one, rename the file to match the movie file then put the movie and the subtitle file inside a same folder.

2. Flip4Mac

The so called complete – Perian – still have one thing missing: the support for Microsoft’s MWV (video) and WMA (audio) formats. So, in order to make Quicktime really complete, we need one more help from Flip4Mac.

The plugin is available for free from Telestream’s site and after installing it, Quicktime can  play WMV and WMA with no problem. But to be able to import those two format, users have to buy the pro version.

3. The alternative – VLC

As an alternative, instead of adding plugins to enable Quicktime to play more formats, Mac users can use VLC (Video Lan Client). This free open source multimedia player always comes up at the top of recommended list. This application has been discussed here several times already.

There are many advantages that VLC has compared to plugin-ized Quicktime, such as the ability to act as multimedia stream server within a speedy network (LAN, WAN, or high speed internet connection), but one that I find most convenient is that users can directly open discs (CD, VCD and DVD). Use File –> Open Disc menu or the shortcut Command + D.

Do you know and use any other plugins for Quicktime, share your experiences and thoughts using the comment below.

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Apart from reviews of the latest gadgets, YouTube is also a great place to watch, well, almost anything that moves!

The only thing that I don’t like is that I have to keep going back online to view videos. Also, I can’t email YouTube videos to my friends who have had YouTube blocked in their offices to save bandwidth or for other reasons.

I’ve seen software for Windows which let the user save videos from YouTube for offline viewing, but since I’m a staunch Linux supporter, I really wanted something similar for Linux and went searching for a YouTube video downloader online.

And I found the perfect utility for the job called youtube-dl. This is a command line utility so you’ll have to be familiar with the Linux command line to use it.

This isn’t that tough and if you’ve been using Linux for any length of time, you probably know how to fire up Terminal, gnome-terminal, konsole or any other Terminal application that you have for your flavour of Linux.

Downloading a video using youtube-dl couldn’t be easier. To download a video you just have to give the URL of the video to the youtube-dl script and then let it do its job. For example, to download the video with the url http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2FpDDEVWtk&feature=channel, I just need to use the command:

youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2FpDDEVWtk&feature=channel

As you can see, the script figures out the actual video path by itself and then starts saving it to the local hard disk. When it has the complete video downloaded, it informs the user and tells you the name that is has saved it under.

The youtube-dl command also supports a couple of parameters which let you do things like saving the video file with the title of the video as the filename, or giving a completely different filename to the downloaded video.

Options:
-h, --help            print this help text and exit
-v, --version         print program version and exit
-u USERNAME, --username=USERNAME
account username
-p PASSWORD, --password=PASSWORD
account password
-o FILE, --output=FILE
output video file name
-q, --quiet           activates quiet mode
-s, --simulate        do not download video
-t, --title           use title in file name
-l, --literal         use literal title in file name
-n, --netrc           use .netrc authentication data
-g, --get-url         print final video URL only
-2, --title-too       used with -g, print title too
-f FORMAT, --format=FORMAT
append &fmt=FORMAT to the URL
-b, --best-quality    alias for -f 18

If you’re trying to download a video which requires you to enter a username and password on YouTube, you can enter that using the --u USERNAME and --p PASSWORD parameters as can be seen in the help menu above.

I’d love to hear about other tools that you guys use to download videos from online sites for offline viewing. Let us know about your favourite tools for the purpose in the comments.

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In this post we show you how to transcode media files using VLC player in Windows platform using wizard as well as command prompt.

Transcoding Media Files using Wizard

1. VLC includes a transcoding and streaming wizard . To transcode a file, select Wizard option in the file menu

2. Select Transcode/Save to file option and click Next to proceed

3. Choose the input file which you want to transcode.

Note: You  can also use partial extract option and time length for the output file

4. Choose the output format you want and choose your desired format along with the bit rate option

5. Finally under the Encapsulation format, select the desired output format.

Give the destination for the target file

6. You can also use the console to see the background process while transcoding is being carry out.

See the sample console screen

Transcoding with the Command Prompt

The following command enable you to transcode a FLV format file to MPEG format

C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC>vlc -vvv “D:\688497.flv” –sout=#transcode{vcodec= mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128,deinterlace}:standard{access=file,mux=ts,url=”D:\ asd.mpg”}

Here is a breakdown of the agrument used in the command line:

access=file: instructs vlc to store the output in a file (and not stream it)

url: the location of the new (output) file.

That’s it.

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sudo apt-get install vlc

Open VLC (Applications -> Sound & Video -> VLC media player)

Select File->Wizard

Click Trancode/save to a file

Select a stream: point to the movie file that you want to convert

Check Transcode Video. Choose the format that you want to convert to. If you want to transcode the sound, check Transcode Audio and choose the format.

Set the encapsulation format. If you are not sure, leave it as RAW

Determine the output filename

Click Finish. VLC will start to transcode the file.