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VLC media player

A free cross-platform media player.

VLC plays nearly every audio and video format you are likely to encounter, including those that other players reject. It bundles its own decoders rather than relying on system codecs, which is what makes it so reliably "just works" across Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. The same single .vlc download covers local files, optical media (DVD, Blu-ray with AACS limitations), network streams, and webcam capture.

VideoLAN, the non-profit behind VLC, originated as an academic project at École Centrale Paris in 1996 with the original goal of streaming video across the campus network. The "VideoLAN client" (VLC) was the player half of that original system; over time the player became the project's defining product. The traffic cone icon is a nod to a cone collection in the school's lab — an enduring inside joke that has long since become the brand identity.

VLC is GPL-2.0+ and remains one of the most-downloaded pieces of free software in history, with hundreds of millions of downloads across platforms. The mobile versions are particularly popular for handling formats that platform-default players (iOS Photos, Android stock players) cannot. The project has long resisted advertising or telemetry, which is unusual for software of its scale.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install vlc
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install vlc
Arch:          sudo pacman -S vlc
macOS:         brew install --cask vlc