Play any media file or stream in unicast or multicast, with VLC VideoLAN Media Player
VLC media player is a portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, Audio CDs and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. It doesn’t need any external codec or program to work.
VLC works on many platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, and more. It can also play from satellite card (DVB-S), and from acquisition or encoding cards (on GNU/Linux and Windows only).
Note also that VLC seems to be the most efficient Media Player so far in the way it handles movie subtitles.
* Don’t miss VLC Untied, a free program that lets you select one or more files or folders in Windows Explorer and load them to VLC media player instantly using a keyboard shortcut, even removing completely any files that may be already loaded and playing, a function that is missing from VLC and is so much useful.