#6 Leopard application of the day (Free)
VLC is a media player that extends support past QuickTime formats, but it also supports WMV (a typical Windows formatted media file) streams as well as a host of other formats. One of the main draws to VLC is that it is capable of playing a movie even if it is not fully downloaded. This is great for checking to see if the title of the movie is matching the content. It is also possible to see if the quality of the movie is any good before wasting time downloading it if is not.
You may recall Free Application #16. Perian, in this add-on to QuickTime we were able to extend the default media player’s capability. However, for some situations VLC still comes in handy.
From the developers site:
VLC media player is a 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 variousstreaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
Supported for Windows, Mac, Linux, & more.