How to Use VLC

This shows you cool things you can do with VLC Player, a multi-platform video player. You can do things like rip and encode DVD's, play videos as ASCII art, and even stream music and video over the internet.

Video Transcription

Welcome to tinkernut.com’s video cast when it comes to playing music and movies on your computer, there is no shortage of programs that allow you to do that. If you search online, you can find hundreds of different programs and players to choose from and each one of this has different benefits, different tweaks, different add-ons. But today in this video, we are going to focus on one and it is called VLC player. And we are going to look at the many different things that you can do with this. It is a pretty neat little application. So what you want to do is go to www.vidoeland.org/vlc and choose an operating system that you are using and choose the location that you want to download from and just save it to you desk top or somewhere. And then just install the application, the defaults are fine for this and whenever you click finish, the program will automatically start. So let us get started with the different things you can do with this. The first thing you can do is you can reap and encode DVDs. So to do this, make sure you have a DVD in your DVD drive, click open disk, and then select stream, save, and click settings. You can select play locally but then select file and click browse and do the name of the file that you want to save it as in the place where you want to save it and then click save. And you have different encapsulation methods to choose from and you also have different trans code and options where you can set the codex and things like that. And then just click okay and it will start encoding and when you are trough, you got your movie encoded. Alright the next thing we are going to do is set the movie as a wallpaper. So all you really have to do for this is click open file, select the movie to open and click Ok. And once it starts playing, you can right click on it and just select set as wallpaper and it is very simple as that. And once you select that, it will show the movie as your desktop. It will be running behind all of your icons and applications and things like that. And so here is an example and so you can be running staff on top of it and the movie will be running on the back ground so that is a really neat little tool right there. I found it very useful when I am working at things like that. Alright the next cool thing you can do with VLC is you can play videos as ASCII Art and ASCI Art is just a series of numbers, letters and symbols that make up pictures. So to do this, just go to open file and select the video clip that you want to play and mine is really short just for the use of this example. And then go to settings and preferences and under video preferences, you will see an option for output modules and you will not see anything there but go down to the bottom and check advanced options and it will allow you to choose color, ASCII Art video output. And then once you click save and play your video again, it plays just numbers and letters. Another cool thing that you can do with VLC is you can play video pod cast and to do this all you got to do is go to preferences and on of the play list option, you will see service directories and then you can select podcast and you can add different podcasts. And if you separate them with the bar which is the same as the back slash key, then you could add multiple ones. And then after you save it, you have to exit out the VLC program but when you restart it, you will be able to see all your different podcast under your play list window. So you can select one of those and it will play it just like a regular video so that is a pretty neat little option also. And you can also add RSS to VLC in the form of subtitles. To do that, go to set preferences and then find the subtitles option and select RSS and Atom feed. Under that option, you can add the different feeds against separating them by a bar. But since this does show up as subtitles, you have to have some type of visualization plain. So if it is music, make sure that you have a visualization check and then just open up a music file. Once you start playing it and it shows a visualization, it will also show the