Downloading Simplicity, Part II–VLC Media Player
Media players have historically been a bitch to use. Windows Media Player appeals to the stoner in all of us with their obsession with visualizations. Realplayer is a festival of terror, as anyone who’s had to upload webcasts can attest. Quicktime does its best to live up by its namesake by taking several minutes and an additional computer freeze to upload that movie trailer for Spiderman 3. WinAmp is a nice place for playlists and audiophiles, but you grow out of using playlists after you discover there’s more to life than listening to often shitty Top 40 radio. It’s all about randomness kiddos.
You usually just have one wish: play that shit. And there’s one program that’s head and shoulders above the rest.
If you haven’t seen VLC Media player yet, you’ve been missing out. Looks beautiful on a Mac, runs fine with Windows (often it’s the Windows files that let you down, not the program itself). You can stream media from your desktop to your laptop. You can play ripped DVDs. And if you can find the right foreign film, just look for the subtitles file for that movie, upload it, and viola, now you’re not bound to watch dubbed Japanese superhero films, no matter the latent comedy they provide.
So when you’re showing your English-speaking compadres your ripped version of Oldboy for the thirty-first time, just remember where you got the idea. If you didn’t have it already. Which you probably did.
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