Wouldn't it be great if you could bring together all your computer media files (MP3, OGG, MPG, MPEG2, MOV, ASF, WMV, FLV etc.) so you could play them how you want, in the order you want, on any type of computer: Windows, Macintosh, Linux etc. regardless of media format and without any digital rights management nonsense getting in the way? 

I'm not advocating pirating copyrighted materials here.  However, I really dislike the way certain large corporations seem prepared to brand users as "criminals" and prevent us from doing the things with our computers that computers are good at doing - or should be good at doing! Moreover, it is doubly annoying that certain types of file can only be played if one buys or rents a particular manufacturer's software. It 's like buying a car, then being told one can only use it on the roads provided by its manufacturer!

So, one of my pet projects is creating cheap, bulk-storage, Linux-based intranet servers to serve all types of media files to client computers in your home or office via a simple web-browser-based interface - regardless of whether the client computers are running Windows, Mac or Linux. Sadly, that dream is still a little way off because I'm still waiting for 2 tebibyte hard drives to become available cheaply!

However, in my studies I have stumbled across some excellent, cross-platform media-player software that will probably be at the heart of any such system. It's called VLC and it available free from the French-based VideoLAN website.

• http://www.videolan.org

What makes VLC media player so great? 

VLC is 100% open source, so you can do pretty much whatever you like with it and install it on as many computers as you please. It plays almost any type of media file without any additional software. It's also very stable. Indeed, in my humble opinion, VLC is the player that Windows Media Player should have been - but isn't. And it plays QuickTime .MOV files without the need to install Apple's rather irritating QuickTime player. I think SlowTime is particularly horrid because it tries to force you to pay for it before you can play a file - every single time you try to open one! Bah, nagware!

No such nonsense with VLC because it's full of open source goodness!

What else does VLC do? 

VLC handles playlists amazingly well. If you do a full installation of VLC then it appears in your file manager's context menu. This allows you to add an entire directory (and subdirectories) to a playlist, regardless of the file-type. Also VLC is "un-skinned" - unless you choose to dress it up. This means it looks like a proper Windows (or Mac/Linux) application with easily understood controls. Another nice feature is that it plays .FLV files, full-screen. FLV's are the flash videos used on Youtube etc.

How do I get and install VLC?

• Windoze & Mac users: you can download the setup .exe or .dmg file and install it as usual.
• Linux users: you can also get a version from Videolan's site but you will need to do a manual installation.
• If you are running Debian or one of its derivatives (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mepis etc) then you can probably use the "apt-get" command from a terminal window using a command similar to "apt-get install vlc".

Merry Christmas & sorry to ramble on! Meantime, I'll try to find a file-type that VLC won't play! Seriously, there are formats that VLC won't play yet. A detailed list of what VLC can and can't do may be found at...

• http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html