Tip #6: Play any file format there is

In tip #5 I showed you how to steal videos from YouTube and other websites, but I left out the part on how to play those downloaded FLV files. If you don't already have a play-it-all media player application or necessary codecs installed, here is a simple (and dirty) trick for getting those FLV files (and other multimedia files you have trouble with) to play.

VLC media player is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It will play all *almost* any audio or video file format you can think of: MPEG, AVI, WMV, MKV, etc (complete list of formats here). It can also play audio, VCD and DVD discs too. When installing VLC, it will ask you which formats you want it to become the default player to open with.

By default VLC will make itself the default for every file format that is. I'm not really happy with this behaviour, because I prefer to have Windows Media Player to open songs instead when I double click on them, and for most others their preferred audio player would be iTunes. I would suggest that you untick the Audio Files option, so that VLC will only handle video files which you have. You can also set if VLC should be used for playing discs such as VCDs and DVDs by ticking/unticking the Discs Playback option.

Once installed, any files which VLC will play when opened will turn into orange traffic cones. From here onwards, just double click on a traffic cone and let VLC play.

If you want to use VLC player, say during a presentation in college, but you are not sure if the computer you are going to use will have VLC player installed (or whether you can install it), there is a portable version of VLC which you can download and install to your pendrive or any removable storage (your memory card, mobile phone, external hard disk etc). The portable version can be downloaded from here.

Take note that portable VLC cannot be set as the default for opening files. You will need to open portable VLC first, then choose Media > Open File to locate the file you want to play, or you could just drag and drop the file onto the player. Also, the portable version of VLC is only available for Windows.