VLC has been downloaded over a billion times

I cherish the VLC.app for iPad that was pulled from the AppStore! It's just great to copy a movie in the app folder and know it will play in VLC without any conversion, etc.<p>It's actually the reason we stopped taking the laptop while away for the weekend. I just put a movie on the iPad for VLC and we are good to go.<p>Edit: But the new VLC on OSX is horrible. Had to revert to the older version, mostly due to the way on-screen-display changed.

There's a lesson in how to make a product in VLC's success. It has a horribly unfriendly interface, and is certainly not pretty, but it doesn't matter - Whatever media file you point it at, you can feel confident that VLC will play it, without hassle.

If you value all the the time you saved by skipping "unskippable" DVD crap in VLC, please consider donating to this amazing project.

Every time I see the VLC website I have to laugh, because I coded it a few years ago back when I was still doing general consulting. It has changed a little bit but it is still nice to be able to look into the code and still see some of my old stuff in there. And yes.... I know some of the markup is terrible. :P

VLC's success is truly a testament to how awful the first-party media player solutions are. People know that sparkly, zoomy UIs on DRM-ridden underpinnings are just lipstick on a pig. VLC isn't pretty but it <i>works</i>.

At least one of the Santa Clara county DAs uses it to play back 911 calls in court. That orange cone on his laptop was unmistakable.<p>Conclusion: VLC is everywhere.

I've always been impressed at what VLC accomplished under the hood, but the usability and configurability of Media Player Classic always pulls me back.

VLC is a great product. Has consistently been among the top media players for the big platforms for quite a while. (Despite occasional slips like the recent changes on OS X, still one of the best.)<p>I have, as others mentioned too, noticed a certain reluctance among the non-techies to download and install VLC. Even so (or maybe especially so), I promote it whenever I can.

No Linux stats. That's too bad! I would really love to see how they would compare to mac and windows download counts.

I used to love VLC, pity they ruined the OSX version.<p>MPlayerX all the way now and I don't look back.

This is an incredible number...I didn't believe it at first but it makes sense given the cumulative version downloads.<p>But except for other techies (fellow students in comsci/comp. eng), I ran into very few people who ever used VLC. They just put up with WMP/VLC/iTunes.<p>Now with Netflix/Amazon/iTunes, I've found myself rarely ever needing another video player. Not that these commercial entities are "better" than what VLC offers, they're just easy enough and provide enough content that I no longer feel the "need" to go to VLC...but that's also because I'm older and have less time to watch things overall.

I'll just add another data point. After the release of VLC 2.0 I was slightly dissatisfied with the new interface on OS X and used the opportunity to try out a couple of alternative players. In the end I stuck with MPlayerX because of short startup time and the minimalistic interface. But it was only a short love affair. The keyboard controls are pretty much non-existent, it can't open DVD menus, it only shows half the available duration of some of my music DVD rips (dual-layer?!?) and I have some occasional weird timing issues with regard to subtitles (image and subtitles suddenly not in sync). In the end I returned to VLC and all of my issues disappeared.<p>So kudos to the VLC team for producing such a great product (despite some questionable interface decisions). I'll take a player which "just works" over the pretty and shiny competitors every day.

These guys killed the MediaPlayer market for the bad.<p>It is one of the apps making knock my head on the table. It is so terribly poor in UX.<p>While the appearance is IMHO seems to be heavily "inspired" from existing players (e.g. Quicktimes controls overlay) without any charming twist, it is implemented ridiculously poor.<p>Boys, a cursor that hides when you try to click the playhead!? Ridiculous. The playhead is so idiotically tiny that this crap product turns into a Aim &#38; Click game.<p>Yea, it's free but this is for no good as it kills any efforts to make something better. This is such a pity.

I am using VLC on linux from time to time, together with others. it is good to know it plays almost everything with a simple UI.<p>Congratulations to the team. for 1 billion downloads. you rock.

You don't need to hunt any plugins or codecs. You install a monolithic package and everything just works. If something doesn't you probably only need to upgrade.<p>Saves a lot of time.

VLC used to be a nice simple program that just did what it said on the tin. Now much more bloated with really slow start up. I use GOM player mainly (Windows)

I know that it's a fallacious statistic but here is the VLC all time OS market share (rounded):<p>Windows: 89.38%<p>OS X: 10.27%<p>Other: 0.35%

I've downloaded it at least 10 times over the years ...

VLC is awesome, but SMPlayer is awesome *2 :)

If you want something smaller, faster and tons more efficient for OS X, I <i>highly</i> recommend MPlayerX instead. It's everything VLC is, and more, with none of VLC's bloat.