VLC Media Player For Windows

VLC is a popular multimedia player for Windows. It has gained most of its popularity due to the fact that it supports almost all of the video formats available. VLC Player also has a very light-weight but customizable interface which means that it will run smoothly even on the older PCs.

VLC Player also comes with most of the codec packs preinstalled so you don't have to look for that one codec packs to make a video work properly.

And of course the best thing is that VLC is free thanks to its open source platform.

Now in its 1.0 release, VLC Player remains the most flexible, lightweight and stable multimedia player for Windows. When other video players will simply refuse to play media at all or without codecs, VLC media player will always be able to play formats such as .MKV (Matroska) or .FLV Flash Video. Another great thing about it is that you can use it to preview files since you can  skip anywhere is a video or a song instantly without any loading time. It also takes almost no time to open at all which maker previewing files even easier and less time consuming.

VLC Player also has excellent hotkey support which means that you can control the player without touching the mouse so if you are watching a Blue-Ray or a DVD pausing can be done simply by hitting a hotkey. Another cool feature is the skinnable interface which lets the user to change the way the media player looks. There  are hundreds of free custom skins that can be downloaded from the official videolan website.