Video has made life much easier for those of us working in criminal law. As a “silent witness” it allows all parties to regard the event without viewpoint bias. However, a problem which has sprung up time after time is the variety of formats which are used by different companies. Apple uses the .mov and h264 the various PC’s primarily use .avi and .wmv formats. There are also different compression formats such as xvid or dvix. The difficulty is in finding a media player which will play all these formats and more.

There are a number of different players which suffer from different shortcomings. Real Player, Windows Media Player, Winamp, and Quicktime have all been around for quite a while. The problem is that each of them fails when asked to play certain files. Sometimes this can be fixed by adding codecs, but even when this can be done it is usually annoying and sometimes time consuming and difficult. In a number of cases nothing is going to make a certain file play on one of these players.

The best solution is the VideoLan VLC Media Player. VLC has been around for a long time and it’s free, but outside of the technically adept it hasn’t made many inroads. This is probably because it doesn’t have a for-profit company pushing it and it isn’t very pretty. However, it is by far the best media player available. It will play almost everything. It works on multiple platforms (Linux, Mac, Microsoft) and will play cross platform videos. I’ve recently heard someone remark with amazement how well it plays .wmv files on OSX. Personally, I’ve fired up VLC any number of times to play videos that only get me a “add-on missing” note when I try to play them on another player. I’ve also had success in using VLC to play videos when other players will only play the sound or show the picture. I’ve even been able to get VLC to fire up weird proprietary formats that are supposed to only work with the company’s software; it won’t work with all the proprietary compression codecs, but 50% is better than none.. I’ve heard more than one person swear “If VLC won’t play it, nothing will.” Download it, get to know its controls, and you will find it the most useful video player you’ve ever had on your computer.