Do you download movies? Regardless the software which has reached this landmark has been a gem for me for years because of its capabilities to play almost any type of video file without having to download codecs. If you use this software you probably know what program I am talking about. Not sure? Hit the jump to find out.
Open-source staple VLC has reached over a billion downloads, the VideoLAN Organization announced Sunday.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols. VLC works on Mac OS X, Windows, and most popular Linux distros, and has support for iOS. It’s kind of like a Swiss Army knife for video and audio in the sense that you can play virtually anything with it by downloading the proper codecs.
The official number of downloads was 1,005,143,569 from late February 2005 through the current day. The stats show a large uptick in downloads across all platforms with the launch of Version 2.0.1.
I’d imaging VLC will probably become the media player of choice for Windows 8 users after Microsoft finally launches the forthcoming operating system. The company recently announced that Windows 8 won’t have built-in DVD-playback because of declining DVD usage.
