Windows 7 Software Compatibility Testing - VLC Media Player

VLC Media Player plays almost any audio and video file regardless its format. This capability is the reason why millions of users consider this great media player to be the best. This amazing compatibility with media files of all sorts is possible due to the fact that VLC Media Player brings its own set of codecs. Thus VLC does not depend on those which you have already installed in your Windows-based machine.

The interface of VLC Media Player has no secrets, even for novice users. Despite its ease of use VLC also brings advanced features such as the ability to stream video.

Throughout its development, the program has been specialized in video playback. This is clearly noted on the possibility of adding subtitles and handling multiple audio tracks associated with a movie.

Another aspect that makes many users to choose VLC Media Player is the ability to open incompletely downloaded videos. Moreover, VideoLAN News claim in its official site that version 1.0.2 meets all of the technical requirements to be Compatible with Windows® 7 and that its latest version, 1.0.3 which is the Release Candidate "…brings a few improvements and fixes, and especially fixes an important issue with Windows® 7 that worsened the video quality of the default output of VLC."

So, I downloaded, installed and run VLC Media Player under Windows 7 and what you are about to read is the result of this testing.

Installation & First Run
Installing VLC was easy and quick, it took only six steps and a couple of minutes to get it finished and ready to run. First of all I was asked to select the language for the installation and after that came the Welcome window and the License Agreement.

Agreeing led me to the Components and Location selection windows.

The sixth and last step was the installation progress which after finishing offered me to run VLC and display the Readme file.

As you can see no incompatibilities delays or troubles of any kind so far.

When running VLC for the first time it showed a notice about its privacy and network policies which I found really interesting and correct. You can see it in the next screenshot.

Functionality & Integration
In order to test VLC's functions and integration with the Windows 7 environment I started by playing for some .avi files and I have to say that it performed perfectly.

Not only VLC played the movie without hitches, but also the audio quality was good, I could change subtitles by selecting them from a folder and look for specific segments within the movie during its playback by dragging the search bar in real-time with no hung-ups, hitches or incompatibilities.

Regarding its integration with Windows 7 environment, I can say that it is perfect, it only took 59MB of RAM and it also worked well with the Aero features.

I also tested the streaming radios playback with equal amazing results.

Bugs Report
As you can imagine I'm going to leave this section empty because not only I could not find bugs myself but searching the web and specific forums and sites resulted in no comments, complaints or reports of incompatibilities or malfunctions even in spite that this is a testing version of the program.

Furthermore, I could find some users complaining but they were all using older versions and in all cases the solution seemed to be updating to 1.0.3 RC which is highly recommended for its use under Windows 7.

Final Words
All in all, VLC seems to be in the right path to become the best alternative media player to install and run if what we are looking for is a light but efficient application to playback and handle our multimedia content. A plus: it is totally free and open source, couldn't ask for more!!

Have you tried VLC under Windows 7? If so, please leave a comment below telling what is your experience like.