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.