VLC Media Player

One thing that will drive me crazy is not being able to play a particular video with Windows Media Player because I lack a certain codec or whatever. I've also been encountering a problem with Power DVD as it crashes during the playback of my DVDs. This happened a lot when I was using my PC to watch videos while I rested on my bed. So I began to search out for a new video player that would play lots of the different video files out there and DVDs. What I found was VLC Media Player. Here is the app's description from its homepage:

" 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 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."

So, far it has worked great and watching DVDs has been much more pleasurable then with Power DVD. VLC Media Player is freeware and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. There are well over 6 million downloads of this media player. I'm also glad it works on Mac as I will be switching to a Mac once the latest version of Mac OS X comes out later this Spring.
If you are looking for a video player that will handle most of the media files that you will come across, VLC Media Player will handle them just fine. BTW, Lifehacker is reporting that you can also rip DVDs with this program. Please be careful and know your country's copyright laws before ripping any copy protected DVD.