Power User Monday Tip of the Week
Access A Variety Of Media Formats
This week's PUM is short and simple. It can be summed up in a single sentence. Download VLC Media Player! If you're frustrated with QuickTime's narrow file format support, or Windows Media Player's inability to work correctly, you'll want VLC Media Player. VLC is a free player that supports a variety of formats including DivX, DVD, VCD, MPEG (1, 2, and 4), WMV (1 and 2), mp3, ogg, and many more. Unfortunately, Windows Media Series 9 files are not supported at this time.
If you're still in 10.2 or 10.1 and don't have the luxury or Apple's most recent DVD player, then VLC is your key to hearing your DVDs in 5.1 digital surround (Apple's DVD Player pre-10.3 only supports 2 channels).
VLC also makes it easy to take screen shots of your DVDs. The DVD screen shot in the previous PUM was taken while playing the DVD through VLC.
VLC is in constant competition with MPlayer and typically the most recent version of VLC will support more formats than the current version of MPlayer and visa versa. However, in my opinion, VLC's controller has more features than MPayer's and is easier to use/understand. VLC also has the nice feature of letting you know why it can't play a file, rather than either crashing or simply not playing the file (as in MPlayer's case).
VLC Media Player is a great player to have sitting around on your hard drive. Give it a try, you won't be disappointed.
Update: Intel Indeo Video 3.2 (IV32) was very widely used as video compression and still is today. Unfortunately, for those of us in OS X, there is no way for us to view these files. Thankfully, if you still have a full OS 9 system, there's a work-around. You'll have to download and install Intel Indeo Video 3.2 in Macintosh HD/System Folder/Extensions and restart. Then you can view the file in OS 9's QuickTime Player. If you have QuickTime Pro in OS 9, you can export the file at the highest possible settings (Uncompressed audio and video will provide you with the highest quality) and make sure to double check the fps with the movie file and what you're setting the compressor to use (you don't want to have 1.5 minutes of audio with 30 seconds of video). From there, you can play the file and do all your final compressing in OS X. Good luck!
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