VLC media player (commonly known as VLC) is a portable, free and open source, cross platform media player and steaming media server written by the Video LAN project.
VLC media player supports many audio and video compresion methods and file formats, including DVD-Video,video CD and streaming protocols. It is able to stream media over computer networks and to trans-code multimedia files.
The default distribution of VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins.