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no actual link to download vlc in the summary. I didn't see one in the linked article either.

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

There's way more in vlc than just playing videos.

Technically speaking, Apple store desired language, fully complies with their restricted access closed garden. Need to pigeon hole Apple in you mind, consider and Ladies and Gentlemen's computer club and cheeky fucker's ain't invited. Yes, that store language is typical of that kind of club, no one is ever really at fault, the environment is creative whilst always remaining pleasant. Don't buy into that lifestyle, don't buy into Apple products, as simple as that. They most certainly do have their place within a broad and diverse environment, but specifically they are designed around a greater acceptance of that controlled country club environment ie targeted at the snooty snoots https://www.collinsdictionary...., the digital toffs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... They do actively pay for exclusivity of computing environment, it is who they are, as a corporation, as staff members and as customers.

Note of clarification, I do not own any Apple products and never have, I did run Quicktime for a while and generally had is as backup but https://www.videolan.org/vlc/ (what more needs to be said, it does the job, with minimal fuss across multiple platforms). Not that I am opposed to Apple products, just somewhat unlikely to purchase them, well, until windows anal probe 10, now the unlikely is becoming the likely, as long as dual boot to Linux, specifically https://kubuntu.org/ is possible, to be blunt so that I can escape the garden when ever I choose to do so and still return, for a more pleasant and polite computing experience.

VLC media player 3.0.0 reportedly introduces AV1 playback.

(Google Search query: vlc player av1)

while decoding is no problem.

Decoding is still a bit slow. But development of dav1d is progressing and it's achieving big speedups over libaom.

Yep, 3.0.4 came out on August 31. I don't see anything on their website or FTP server about a newer release.

The dev changelog does refer to a version 3.0.5, but the changes listed there don't include fixing this vulnerability.

AV1 is a new video codec by the Alliance for Open Media, composed of most of the important Web companies (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft,...).

I would have added "developed" or "written" or "created" before "by", but whatever, I'm busy figuring out how a codec is composed of "most of the important Web companies" or why we're capitalizing "Web".

AV1 has the potential to be up to 20% better than the HEVC codec, but the patents license is totally free, while HEVC patents licenses are insanely high and very confusing.

I'm going to give you a pass on the unexplained "better", and "the patents license" may be an awful Britishism that I'll ignore (for now), but if the HEVC "patents licenses" are "insanely high", isn't that a problem? Are they going to go out and announce that they're taking HEVC public at $420?

The reference decoder for AV1 is great, but it's a research codebase, so it has a lot to improve.

I'd throw in "based on" or "compiled against" before "a research codebase", and probably throw in an "on" after improve (or rewrite it so there's no preposition at the end of a sentence, though I never found that to be a logical rule). However, the big concern here is that you're calling the reference decoder "great" while simultaneously saying that it isn't.

Therefore, the VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have started to work on a new decoder, sponsored by the Alliance of Open Media. The goal of this new decoder is: be small, be as fast as possible, be very cross-platform, correctly threaded, libre and (actually) Open Source.

You shouldn't be capitalizing "Open Source" here, and something being "very cross-platform" doesn't really fit, unless you're talking about a waffling politician. Can we at least agree on quantity, though? You've listed more than one goal. You want "goals" and "are".

Without further due, the code: https://code.videolan.org/vide...

It's "without further adieu", you clown!

The reason it took so long to get hardware decoding working in x86 in general is because x86 is the bleeding edge in this particular instance. That's where all the newest stuff is tested first.

After the tech is worked out, the rest is usually just a mix of getting drivers for your hardware to actually respect the specs. On linux, that's always been a bitch. On android, it's actually quite well standardized in terms of relevant APIs and specs. Which is why VLC's android page states the following:

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/d...

"Features: Multi-core and full hardware decoding.

-Decoding performance

VLC can decode video in software and hardware mode. Hardware decoding often provides better performance but is not supported on all devices. If your device Android version is below 4.3, software decoding may be the only supported option for you."

http://www.videolan.org/ The one linked on their site: https://play.google.com/store/...

Klein also suggests OSS foundations start providing fellowships to key maintainers,

That's not gonna fix it. If anything it's going to make it worse.

People keep viewing pay software as the software authors demanding money from users. It's actually the other way around. Users paying software authors is how they signal what features they like or want. That's how users influence the direction of future software development - the software authors want to be paid more, so they make changes or implement features and fix bugs that the users want.

Without payment, open source is basically a dictatorship. The software authors dictate what features to add, what bugs get priority, what new direction the software should take. The users are powerless. This gives contributors and especially maintainers an inflated ego, which makes them even more resistant to accept user feedback and suggestions. Paying maintainers from a foundation would just exacerbate this behavior by inflating their egos even more, and further insulating them from user feedback.. (The VLC developer eventually relented after a couple years, after much ass-kissing by users, and changed VLC so you could assign the mouse wheel to something other than volume.)

If you want to fix it without having users pay for open source software, then I can think of two ways. Either you need to eliminate the egos of the programmers and maintainers, which realistically is never going to happen. Or you need to set up a system where users can pledge a bounty payment for when the project implements a feature or fixes a bug the user wants. The payment should be held in escrow (refunded after a certain time to encourage timely action), to be awarded to the open source project only if the user-requested feature is added or bug fixed. That would fix open source by giving users a say in the course of software development again (other than ass-kissing), without the stigma of requiring all users to pay to use the software.

That'll turn open source software from whatever the hell the programmers and maintainers want it to be. To something which the users actually want, and which addresses their needs and requirements. The way things are right now, open source is frequently throwing free food at users when what the users really want is water. With the project maintainers and contributors ignoring user pleas for water because making food is more fun or fulfilling.

Doesn't that lock you into streaming video from Chrome though, rather than just sending the graphics card output?

It's possible to send it through VLC to Comcast https://vlc-media-player.en.so... this is a VLC download and linked only for it's text, It's best to get VLC from it's source https://www.videolan.org/vlc/i...

So, if iTunes goes away....and I wouldn't mind a better interface, but will there be anything left on MacOS that allows me to catalog, rip and manage MY music local?

That's the laugh: There have pretty much ALWAYS been alternatives to iTunes for macOS available from 3rd Parties. I happen to like iTunes; so I don't have much experience with these Applications, but I know they exist, and have for years in one form or another:

Kodi: This was formerly the XBMC Project. It has been available on multiple platforms for years and years. It and Plex (below) are the heavy-hitters in this world, IMHO.

https://kodi.tv/

Plex: Originally grew out of the XBMC Project, as a Mac-specific version of same.
  Probably the most full-featured Media Server/Player Combination. Too many features and platforms to mention here. Also check out the companion macOS PlexAmp lightweight Player.

https://www.plex.tv/plex-labs/...

VLC: Plays anything that even PRETENDS to be a music or video file! Versions available back to OS X 10.0 Cheetah, FFS!!! I don't know if it can Rip; but it sure can PLAY!!!

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/d...

And I found a nice page that aggregates these things, here it is:

https://alternativeto.net/soft...

Yes, the Windows x64 3.0.0 version is now at http://download.videolan.org/v.... I downloaded and installed it. It works fine for both streaming broadcasts and local .mp4 video files on my PC.

Late to the party but Win64 has arrived https://get.videolan.org/vlc/3...

VLC 3.0 got pushed to my android 7.1 this AM. Here is the 3.0 link from TFA https://www.videolan.org/vlc/r...

The home page for VideoLAN at https://www.videolan.org/ still indicates the current version is 2.2.8. The downloads page at http://download.videolan.org/v... does show a version 3.0.0. For Windows, however, there is no x64 version yet. Since I usually use VLC for listening to streaming broadcasts of classical music, I will wait for an x64 Windows version.

The home page for VideoLAN at https://www.videolan.org/ still indicates the current version is 2.2.8. The downloads page at http://download.videolan.org/v... does show a version 3.0.0. For Windows, however, there is no x64 version yet. Since I usually use VLC for listening to streaming broadcasts of classical music, I will wait for an x64 Windows version.

It's a lot more expensive to implement hardware than software

Again, you lose focus on the practical realities. VP9 has had hardware support for years. You mentioned video game consoles. I hope you don't have an XBox One or a Switch because they both support VP9 out of the box. That would be awkward.

If you're implementing in software,

What, like you can on a video game console? Cool.

For hardware manufacturers... it's not so simple.

Sure sounds simple to me. I can play VP9 video on my iPhone 7 with VLC for iOS. What's the complication?

You really should try to adopt a more pragmatic approach to these things. Your pointless pontificating wastes a lot of your time. You'll be happier without it.

Software decoding is a possible choice, but requires so much power that it is infeasible on anything but a laptop or desktop.

VP9 video plays back perfectly in software on my iPhone 7 using VLC for iOS.

https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_... ?
I was really seeing if it had support for "plugins" though.

Hardware VP9 decoding is rare enough of a feature already.

It's not that rare. Intel's been shipping VP9 decode acceleration for two years now. Android has supported VP9 decoding since Android 4.4, which was released in late 2013. If you have an Android phone, you probably have VP9 hardware acceleration. Plenty of AV1 hardware will be released in late 2018.

But also don't underestimate today's mobile devices. I have an iPhone 7 and I can play VP9 video in software in VLC for iOS without issue. A future VLC update will add AV1 support.

most user uses chrome which has flash and will ditch it soon. why release that?

True, but if you have a Flash video (ie *.flv) you could always use VLC or MPV to play them.

Of course, if you don't like flash videos in their raw format you could use HandBreak to transcode them, although a word of warning, HandBreak is really CPU intensive so you would be better off with a decent one unless you don't mind the wait.

For most Linux distributions you can download the players or transcoder by using their respective repository allowing them to be automatically maintained. Also for your interest, all the software named does support 8bit, 10bit, 12bit as well as the H254 and H265 codecs including other formats.

I missed the chance to submit this question. Perhaps it's not too late?

On dual-GPU laptops, the NVidia control panel silently prevents VLC from running on the higher-end discrete video card (and it cannot be selected as the option is greyed out), forcing it instead to run on the lower-powered integrated (usual Intel) video card. Changing the executable name from "vlc.exe" to "notvlc.exe" allows it to run on the discrete video card, suggesting that it's a deliberate targeting by NVidia. Many users have reported it for years, but it is unknown why (c.f.: https://forum.videolan.org/vie...). I can confirm that it's present in the most recent NVidia driver (as of August, 2016).

What did you do to piss off NVidia and how are they getting away with this overt targeting of VLC? Are there talks going on behind the scenes to resolve the issue?

You can't even listen to music on OS X or iPhone without the software contacting Apple.

Actually, yes I can.

However, the summary also mentions iOS, and I was under the impression that GPL apps on the Apple AppStore are a no go?

FWIW, the situation is a bit more nuanced than that.

If the GPL licensed code is entirely your own work, you can relicense it any way you want, including to Apple for distribution on the App Store.

Where you can get into trouble with the App Store is if you take someone else GPL'd code and release it on the App Store. This could be by including third-party GPL routines, or by publishing code that was developed by multiple parties, without their permission, where copyright has not been reassigned. This was the case for the VLC player: as the article you linked alludes, Apple took that old VLC player app out of their app store due to a copyright complaint from one of the VLC developers. That was back in 2011 -- the VideoLAN Oragniaztaion has since released their own VLC for iOS, while still retaining the GPL license (albeit in part by dual-licensing it as MPL/GPL).

Yaz (IANAL)

can someone please inform the VLC developers of their expired signing key?

Here it is:
https://get.videolan.org/keys/...

While it will still sign new VLC releases, it is listed as expired when you import it into GPG.

"VLC doesn't let you play through a region locked DVD. At least it didn't for me and my DVD drive."

There is a pretty succinct explanation of why you had trouble here.

Have they bothered to come up with a decent easy to use encoder/decoder?

Well, here's a list. Some are free, some (like Sorenson Squeeze) cost money. VLC can also transcode to WebM. Handbrake does support VP8, but to a Matroska container (WebM is a subset of Matroska).

But who would do that?

A: You should NOT be giving the impression that either Google or Apple use Qt because you found a few independent developers how make apps for Android or iOS which happen to use Qt.

B: The OSX VLC GUI is written with Cocoa/Objective C, the only platform than I know is Qt is Linux.

I haven't used them much on Windows, but Qt apps on OSX are always a train wreck, nothing feels write, everything looks fake (because it is fake, all the controls are emulated), nothing lines up, and all look like a warmed over Win3.1 app with a cheesy emulated OSX skin. Linux is usually the only platform where Qt apps work well.

You could of course a popular SDK that works on desktops as well. But who would do that?

Supposedly Chromecast support will be in VLC 3.0.

Support for old hardware varies with the platform. PPC and 32-bit Intel cpu support for Macs was dropped as of version 2.1. That affected the first Intel machines Apple shipped, in late 2006 or so IIRC. 32-bit PCs are still supported. The difference is due to Apple being more aggressive about dropping old hardware when updating the developer tools.

Old versions of VLC are available.
http://download.videolan.org/p...

... unless we pretend we aren't in the U.S.
Hooray for patents!

https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/...

At least as of 2014 in order to get click-to-pause on windows you had to install a special plugin. Unfortunately, the plugin doesn't even work for anything after VLC 2.0, so users are advised to simply not upgrade, which is just sad, honestly.

As for the full-screen hotkey, maybe it's in the options, but why is VLC's default not in line with just about every other mainstream video player? It's as if Google Drive decided to change the shortcut for pasting from CTRL-V to CTRL-P -- it's irritating and unnecessary.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/do... So... maybe it's just management of the site content is bollocks...

I would test a nightly build and then report your experience to bug #11060.

I would test a nightly build and then report your experience to bug #11060.

No news about supporting Google Chromecast? The discussion on the forum[1] has been dead quite some time. I can see in the git repo that there actually *is* code present (cast.cpp) and I would guess that this would be a really appreciated feature.

[1]: https://forum.videolan.org/vie...

Personally, I have high expectations for VideoLAN Movie Creator (because my experience with VLC Media Player has been excellent). Unfortunately, it's been in an "under-development" state for almost as long as I can remember. I just hope they get to a complete, stable release sometime soon. http://www.videolan.org/vlmc/

You're making good points up to here:

I'm all for open source on widely-used software (e.g. the OS, TCP/IP stack, web server, etc). But going completely open source eliminates the market forces which allow users to tell developers what they want in the software. What you end up with is a tyranny by the developers which is very slow to respond to user likes/dislikes (VLC eventually let users change the mouse wheel function). Modifying copyright as I've suggested results in more of a middle ground, where market forces are preserved, but pricing control is not completely up to the content creator.

The first page ends like this: "Your patch is welcome..." from the tyrant. They could always go the Apple way and never respond, ever... And if your bug gets fixed, good for you. If not... /dev/null is your conversation partner.

I've been skimming over page 2, and it's a pissing contest. Apparently the change was done in "next version", but the version in question (0.9) was left unchanged because of this one user. The markings were there: just fork it and backport it, or wait for the next version.

But that's not the point I want to make. The point is that's what you get when you deal with the developers directly instead of a PR department (because there isn't any). I've experienced this outside software too: you never, ever, talk to the operators of your ISP. You talk to PR, and they forward your complaints to the admins, and their responses/actions back to you. I was a customer for a very tiny ISP (one admin, two servers, one sales guy, no PR). They would offer support over chat, and the admin would get on the line himself. Discussions would easily escalate to be indistinguishable from what I've just read in that VLC thread. Customers think they'll get a better deal if they raise their tone, and don't give a fuck about reason. I managed to get myself a "free Internet" deal by volunteering to do the PR for them, since I was on chat all the time anyway, and I had the knowledge, and didn't mind the experience. Customer attitudes differed, because they were aware I had no real power, and my role was to massage their "fuck you" filled complaints into something the admin and company owners could read without getting grief.

You can get tyranny with closed source and large companies just fine, but for some reason that's OK?

The analogy fails but still gives insight into what causes the current situation.

Using the original analogy, what's essentially happened is that only cheeseburgers are sold. There are no hamburgers for sale. It's cheaper/more efficient for the fast food joints to only pre-make and keep warm cheeseburgers, than to have separate lines for cheseburgers and hamburgers.

"But that's silly! Cheeseburgers have an extra component so are more expensive to make than hamburgers. Why would a restaurant only make cheeseburgers rather than only hamburgers?" Ah, now you've picked up on the insidious reversal of market forces which causes this pricing inversion. It costs money to put cheese on every hamburger. It costs virtually nothing to install Windows on every PC. So the fact that most people want cheeseburgers / Windows on their PC wins out.

That's right. Software costs almost nothing to duplicate. While it costs money to develop software, the cost to duplicate it is essentially zero. It's like if you had to feed a cow, milk it, and process the milk to make that first slice of cheese. But every slice of cheese thereafter could be replicated Star Trek-style for virtually zero cost.

So why are we paying $100+ for copies of something that costs Microsoft virtually nothing to duplicate. Because of an inherent flaw in Copyright law which basically eliminates market forces on prices. With manufactured products, prices decrease the more the product sells. You can amortize development costs over more sales, production lines become more efficient, raw materials costs decrease because you can contract to buy larger volumes. That's why the first DVD players cost nearly $200, but today you can pick up a cheap one for $20.

Current copyright law subverts this process. By giving the content creator absolute control over distribution over a unique product, there's no incentive for them to lower prices. What needs to happen is for copyright protection to somehow scale with volume. e.g. Your copyright lasts for life+70 years, or 50 million copies sold, whichever occurs first. Or a sliding scale for pricing. If you initially release a CD at $20 for the first million sales, the price must drop to $10 thereafter. After 10 million sales the price must drop to $5. $2 after 50 million. $1 after 100 million.

This would restore much of the original intent of Copyright which has been subverted by ridiculously long copyright terms - encouraging artists to create new works, rather than allowing them and their children (and their grandchildren) to live off the proceeds from a single highly successful work. In terms of software, it would encourage companies like Microsoft to constantly seek out new ways to improve their software rather than resting secure in the knowledge that people will "buy it anyway". And by keeping pricing more proportional to amortized development costs (sale price drops after development has been paid off), it'll discourage the ridiculous behavior where a company will use profit from one software title to sustain an unprofitable title for years in an attempt to gain a foothold in the market. That'll help new software companies break into the market (they won't be competing against a product that's being subsidized by unrelated software sales), and bring more diversity and dynamics to the marketplace.

I'm all for open source on widely-used software (e.g. the OS, TCP/IP stack, web server, etc). But going completely open source eliminates the market forces which allow users to tell developers what they want in the software. What you end up with is a tyranny by the developers which is very slow to respond to user likes/dislikes (VLC eventually let users change the mouse wheel function). Modifying copyright as I've suggested results in more of a middle ground, where market forces are preserved, but pricing control is not completely up to the content creator.

That can happen if all GPL code gets relicensed or rewritten. VideoLAN's page about VLC for iOS states that it was relicensed under the Mozilla Public License, and presumably that wouldn't include any contributions from a contributor who declined to relicense his contributions. I wasn't party to the relicensing negotiations, and I lack my own iOS device on which to evaluate this app. Are any significant codecs or containers missing?

I'm talking data de-duplication searching tools,

Son, are you kidding me?

multi-monitor window managers,

What?

downloading / p2p tools,

Excuse me?

media players,

You fail it

media encoders

Wrong

etc.

Are you even trying?


In unrelated news, slashdot doesn't let me post this reply as-is, because it consists of too short lines, on average. Wtf. Fooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

If you disable DASH, doesn't that mean you just can't get 1080p video and are stuck with 720p at best?

I myself just drag-and-drop the youtube links into vlc and let it play them directly. VLC doesn't do DASH either, so according to this bug it is stuck at 720p.

But at least there are no ads and no autoplay and it is easy to resize, etc, etc.

In your glass tower, yes.

In the real world, not so much.

Here is an example of one of the world's most optimized pieces of software: x264. It's also one of the few real-world loads that can take advantage of multiple processor and SSE. So how much speedup did this incredible piece of software see with AVX2, which DOUBLED the width of the integer pipelines?

FIVE PERCENT! Yup, that's it!

All that work for so very little improvement, because in the REAL WORLD data does not align on perfect AVX2 boundaries, and data fetch is as much of a hindrance as the actual processing of that data. Read more about WHY this is the best that could be done here, if you don't mind paying for SCRIBD.

Parading around test results form something like Passmark is just self-delusion. It only tests that the features do in-fact work, and these tests tend to work directly from cache in small data sets that are usually not branch-heavy. IT gives score for number of MIPS, but does not take into account the fact that most real software can't actually make use of these features at-speed.

And when they increase the vector size yet-again to 512-bits wide in a year, it will once-again be a limited real-world improvement, because optimization of real loads is hard, and auto-vectorization of arbitrary loads is even harder problem to solve. So Intel keeps adding new features, and they keep adding about 5-7% each (real world). So I don't see how you get above 3x from those puny performance increases, while not deluding yourself.

I think he's ignoring these until someone posts the links:
VLC media player for Mac OS X
Download the latest version of Google Earth for PC, Mac, or Linux

tablet user: I use it to watch netflix and play games

RMS: You shouldn't use ti for that because it requires non-free software.

tablet user: but if I don't, how can I watch movies and play games.

RMS: you should use a free tablet

tablet: where can I get one and can I use netflix and play angry birds.on it

RMS: Pay with coding skills or money to free a tablet.

Also, these activities don't require non-free software. Download DRM-free videos with Transmission and play them in VLC. Play (and improve!) Angry Tux. It's your own servileness that's holding you back.

What other GPU enabled software runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux?

For starters: Every game that makes use of 3D and is available for the three platforms, scientific software like Paraview, Slicer 3D, 3D rendering software like Blender, the famous video player VLC, ...

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish.

* 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/

* CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n...

* Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n...

* IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/

Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/

* KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/

* LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/

* Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/

* SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co...

* UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg...

* VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, oen source, Linux/Mac/Windows)
http://www.videolan.org/

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish. There are few others, but some are more as needed special use cases. * 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/ * CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n... * Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n... * IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/ Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/ * KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/ * LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/ * Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/ * SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co... * UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg... * VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats ) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.videolan.org/

Does VLC play MOD, S3M, XM, IT, or other tracked formats?

Yes.

Does VLC play NSF, SGC, GBS, VGM, SPC, PSF, USF, PSF2, GSF, 2SF, or any other video game console-oriented formats?

Some of them but maybe more of your list as well.

Heck, it also plays MIDI on Linux and other systems with glib.

The basic thing is - if there's an open-source codec, VLC plays it without requiring any plugins.