Reviews by Berman

I have been a VLC user for quite some time and believe it to be the best video player available. Videolan recently released the latest version (3.0.3). I was pleased to discover that it supports closed captioning.

I sometimes have trouble hearing what people say, particularly when they have an unfamiliar (to me) accent or they mumble (which happens a lot in TV shows and movies).

One minor downside of the new version is that fast-forward at 8x doesn't work any more -- it worked perfectly in version 2.2.6. Fast-forward at 4x sort of works. It trundles along for a few seconds, then the picture freezes. If you wait a while, it will restart, but not where it left off. It restarts where it would have been if it hadn't frozen.

Another option is to quickly backspace 3 seconds when the picture freezes and, in most cases, it will get by that freeze point. It's a fairly minor point (after all, how often do you want to fast-forward at 4x or 8x?) but I do use it from time to time to catch reception errors on recorded TV programs that I haven't yet watched at normal speed before passing the program on to someone else.

Going through a one- or two-hour program at 8x takes long enough -- 4x obviously takes twice as long. Anything less than that is pretty much not worth the time. I hope that they correct this in the next version -- but that could be a long time coming.

They tend to leave a rather long time between versions. Nevertheless, VLC is a terrific video player and that one quirk is not enough to lower my rating.