VLC media player

VLC media player was mentioned at a recent C&C meeting where a member was having difficulty playing Real Media (.ram) files from a BBC website.

I tried on my home PC and could not get them to play on either Windows Media Player or my alternative, Real Alternative, both of which should have handled these files. In case the problem was a missing or outdated codec I installed the XP Codec Pack which purports to include every codec necessary for all media types in XP. It made no difference and I installed VLC. Problem solved. VLC is a cross-platform media player supporting a large number of media formats including streaming media.

It is a small program with a simple, obvious interface that offers a wide range of features for each different media type, and is available from http://www.videolan.org/