With the start of CES, I have needed to play some unusual video formats, including some that I couldn’t even get to work on Windows or OS X. In these cases, I have turned to a trick I have heard before: use VLC. So far, VLC has been able to open just about everything I have thrown at it, including a live video feed of Balmer’s keynote (there was always the chance of him making a fool of himself ). This leads me to a tip, which is something I don’t do very often:

Install VLC (if your on Ubuntu, it can be added from Add/Remove…) and use it whenever you can’t make something play.

That may be an old trick for many of you, but it is still incredibly useful.

This got me thinking about new users’ experience with videos or, for that matter, audio on Linux. Obviously there are licensing issues, but there are also just strange inconsistencies. Various programs open various different types. Some may be better than others, but nothing is perfect.

The real solution to this is to just go through each one and test them all, but that’s not very realistic… unless the computer does it for you. Imaging this: you download a video and open it to play it. Behind the scenes, the operating system or some application attempts to play the video with Totem. If that fails, it tries VLC. Then, if that fails it tries Miro. And so on. The idea is that the process of hunting for the right software could be automated by one program that tries a list of programs until one works. This could greatly enhancce a user’s ability to play obscure video or audio files, such as live streams. It would also make this much less confusing for new users. Sure everything would still not be playable, but at least it wouldn’t take you 10 minutes to find that out.

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