In a world of fractured codecs, splintered music formats, and digital copy protection it can be a pain to find a video player that handles everything with ease. Well, it used to be a pain until you found this article. Now you can just click on over to VideoLan and download VLC. If you’re not willing to do that on my world alone, keep reading.

VLC has been around for years, getting better with each passing version until at this point it’s the yardstick by which all other media players are measured. It’s supported by every operating system, it plays every format. In fact, there are so many features to list that I’m just going to link to their features page instead. It’s truly mindblowing.

In addition to all of the awesome features VLC is fully skinnable with dozens of user created skins to choose from. So not only does VLC work spectacularly, it looks good doing it.

Now I’m sure you’re thinking, “Well, that’s nice. But it’s still just a video player, right?” WRONG. Not only is VLC a video player, it actually can act as a streaming media server for your LAN or even across the internet. Oh, and just as a geeky bonus it’s fully IPv6 compatible. Truly it is the holy grail of Media Players. Download it, use it, love it.