VLC Media Player isn’t just an app. It’s a life-saver.

Are you trying to open a video that’s in a format your Windows or Mac machine doesn’t support? VLC. Do you need to listen to music in a long-forgotten format but don’t have a player that supports anything but MP3 and AAC? VLC. Do you need a decent DVD player for Windows? VLC. Do you need… you get the idea.

It’s available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS and Android, and it’s brilliant.

Why you need it

In an ideal world everything would just work when you wanted it to, but over the years we’ve evolved all kinds of competing formats for music and video – and different delivery mechanisms too, ranging from discs to downloads and streaming. VLC knows about all of them, and that means it’s our go-to app for any kind of media playback.

It has excellent tools for tweaking video and audio playback, it can play formats nobody’s mentioned for years, it’s blazingly fast and it does everything without spyware, ads or anything else unnecessary.

Factor in a whole bunch of interface skins and a big library of add-ons and VLC Media Player is the Swiss Army Knife of digital media.

Download here: VLC Media Player