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| | | Tuesday, February 03, 2009 |  | VLC Media Player vs GOM Player
By Binod @ 10:52 AM :: 18675 Views :: 15 Comments ::  :: tkGuru Software Guides |  | Introduction
Microsoft is the software company that dominates the PC industry and while their flagship products are their various versions of the Windows operating system, those operating systems come with a lot of extra software. Since one of the main functions of a modern PC is that of a media player, Windows Media Player is bundled with Microsoft Windows and any time you go to play music or video, that’s the default player. That is unless you switch to another one.
PC users are not so scared of free software anymore. If you get a pop-up window offering a dubiously useful tool, people should probably still steer clear, but downloading and installing free alternatives to Microsoft add-ons can be a good thing. Since Media Player doesn’t support all codecs, it is one piece of software that is often given the boot in favor of a free alternative. In this article I’ll take a look at two of the most well known free media players, VLC Media Player from the VideoLAN Team and GOM Media Player from GRETECH CORP. VLC Media Player
Let’s first start with the history of VLC Media Player. VLC Media Player is the result of a student project started at the French Ecole Centrale Paris and later turned into a worldwide project with developers from 20 countries. VLC Media Player is a cross-platform multimedia player and can be used on various operating systems ranging from Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS and Syllable.
There have been over 34 582 339 downloads of VLC. The latest version for Windows and Mac OS X is 0.9.8a and you can download it here. I downloaded the Windows version of the player, a 15.6MB file. The installation was quite simple and fast. 
By default, the VLC Media Player comes with two skins (different looks) that you can choose from (pictured above and below). There are many other skins available on the VideoLAN website 
VLC Media Player allows you to configure the player with lots of significant options. To get into the configuration section right click on VLC player while watching a video to get all the options or access them via the Settings menu and then select Preference. 
To get into the configuration section right click on VLC player while watching a video to get all the options (as above) or access them via the Settings menu and then select Preference (as shown below). |
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| Comments |  Byexpanium @
Tuesday, February 03, 2009 4:20 PM |
Yeah for sure GOM is the best and the last version adds option to change skins.
Maybe the next time you compare these 2 video players with Media Player Classic (is a good player too)
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| By
ryan @
Saturday, February 07, 2009 4:16 AM | |
VLC is much better and open source. It can run on almost any OS, not just Windows. |
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| By
Chocobollz @
Monday, February 09, 2009 10:19 AM | |
GOM? VLC? Alright, I've tried VLC before and I think it's not good. And GOM, WTH is that? I never heard LOL. I think MPC is the best media player. And about playing a corrupted AVI files? Yeah, right? MPC could do it too so what? LOL |
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| By
fiona @
Monday, February 09, 2009 10:39 PM | |
MPC huh? Fair enough, we'll test it and right up an article for you! |
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| By
kuolas_kaln @
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 3:40 PM |
Looks like author has used some really old version of VLC for comparison. The latest one (even older ones) can play broken AVI files and can even fix them. And it does play flv files too.
It's a shame that author missed very important point that VLC is so much more than a player. In fact the player functionality is less than a half of what VLC really is.
VLC can be used not only for just playing files but also for converting/transcoding, streaming live video/playing live streams. VLC is built on a concept of modules ie input modules, output modules and control modules.
Input can be a file, a network stream and/or live a/v capture device (TV tuner for example).
Output can be screen, file(many supported codecs/containers) or a live network stream (again lots of codecs, containers and protocols supported). There are also quite a few control interfaces, ie you can tell your player start or stop playing via telnet connection or WWW from a remote PC or even your mobile phone.
This variety of features and ways you can do things makes it only down to your imagination what you can do with VLC.
I for example managed to setup VLC on my home PC to send video and audio streams to my mobile phone. Basically I was able to play music and watch films on my phone directly from my home PC. Amazing. |
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| By
Chocobollz @
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 3:56 PM |
Oh.. that's interesting. I think I'll give it a shot :-). And about my comment earlier, I just want to make the discussion a lil bit hot hehe :p Well I think VLC might worth a try but I haven't used it for a long time. Last time I try it maybe in 2004! :p So it may got a lot of improvements now. MPC in itself has a lot of drawbacks too. The most obvious one is its slow development. Maybe the author has stopped developing it? Who knows? lol
Cheers! |
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| By
twizttid13 @
Wednesday, February 11, 2009 4:35 PM | |
Now that's just odd. I know for a fact the latest VLC can play bluray. |
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| By
Placebo @
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 12:08 PM |
IMO The KMPlayer and SMPlayer are better than either VLC or Gom due to the fact they combine external codec free video playing with being feature full, KMPlayer is my primary choice of video player.
http://kmplayer.en.softonic.com/
http://www.kmplayer.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=25
http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/ |
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| By
VLC fan @
Friday, February 20, 2009 10:38 AM |
In my experience, VLC has played any format I need out-of-the-box. It is my #1 choice for video and general media player (I use MediaMonkey for my main audio collection :P), and with its constant updates, it's always getting better!
Also, I have had bad experiences with media players without menus. Very bad, indeed. |
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| By
prem @
Thursday, March 19, 2009 4:53 AM | |
vlc had a demerit that it could not play audio for some vidio file.but gom playaer didnot the same. |
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| By
Al @
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 9:05 AM |
VLC is an excellent player no doubt but it has somethings which are really irritating-
1) You cannot control the volume with the arrow keys, the scroll works but thats not user friendly for notebook users.
2) It does not save or remember any of the user settings once you close the programme like customzied sound equalizer, cropped viideo etc.
Mainly because of these two things, I have shifted to Media Player Classic. |
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| By
vforever @
Tuesday, July 14, 2009 7:15 PM |
just press Ctrl + Up/Down for the volume. It's ok with that. besides, what's wrong with the touchpad scroll? :)
about the second one, lazy to check this now, i'm sure you can get with that as well, you can always check the manual... |
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| By
Ola @
Thursday, July 16, 2009 7:08 PM | |
VLC is great, but why does it not have the facility to - say - go back 10 seconds, 20 seconds, etc. It is the reason I switched to GOM. And GOM is great also, btw. I keep both. |
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| By
e.garvin @
Thursday, September 17, 2009 9:19 AM | |
I have and use GOM player, VLC and MPC (and I've tried most of the "for money" media players) My favorite is GOM. It has the most features and the most attractive interface of the three, IMO. I've noticed VLC having wierd issues with the image freezing while the sound continues to play, and sometimes the image will appear highly pixelated for a few moments. If I play the exact same file with the other two there are no problems. I think MPC is probably the lightest player in terms of resource use, but it doesn't have the same features and it looks sort of "cheap" to me. GOM has a very tastefully designed interface. It sounds to me like a lot of people are defending VLC out of blind loyalty. Why don't you download them all and try them all and see for yourself which one you like? They're all free afterall. |
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| By
bb king @
Thursday, January 14, 2010 11:16 PM | |
most of these comments sucks, like that player has no jump..can't change keys [hotkeys], etc. well almost any player has the same features. the richest player in features is vlc and someone can find it's cross platform compatibility useful. that doesn;t mean that makes it the best plaayer available though, maybe at the moment, but I used to use mpc-hc and it worked like a charm last 2 years, but recent builds became buggy like vlc was until the version 1.0. now I am downloading gom to give latest version a try. I remember mv2 player it was great stuff at moment, but project was abandoned, so when we talk about best player there is no such, easiest hassle free was mpc-home cinema! [latest version 1.3.1503] but latest versions seem a bit buggy for me, vlc [current version 1.0.3] has some advanced features and it's no so intuitive. forget about bs & mv2. kmplyer isn't bad at all, recommended for some rare mobile phone video files, but would not be my first choise [at the moment of writing this post]. gom player wasn't bad at all, now I am downloading the latest version for evaluation. it's still free though. after all I always say that open source matters so keep that in mind when choosing software. |
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