Apple QuickTime Player is a multimedia player software that handles a variety of files of different formats from digital photos to panoramic images, audios to videos as well as interactivity. This multimedia player program is available for Mac OS X computers as well as later versions of Windows computers. This software product by Apple has Software Development Kits or SDKs which is available to the public as long as subscribed with the Apple Developer Connection or ADC. It has QuickTime framework, which is compatible with other free player applications, that provide several functions. These include the encoding of audios and videos, transcoding of those same files, decoding with the option to send a decoded stream to graphics subsystem or audio subsystem, and a component plugin architecture to support other codecs (third party like DivX). The latest version of this software is QuickTime Player 7 which is downloadable for free for Mac and Windows computers.
VideoLan VLC Media player is a multi-media player software that is considered to be an open source and cross platform multimedia player with framework. Thus, a product that can play most of the standard files of multimedia plus CDs, DVDs and VCDs. It also plays different streaming protocols, supported applications or devices and webcams. There is also the ability to play audios of various codecs even if there are no codec packs included: MPEG-2, WebM, MP3, WMV and MKV. This software works on most Windows computers, Mac OS X PCs, Linux and well as Unix. In addition, there is descryption for DVD which is executed via the libdvdcss library. It also has playback control support for all computers compatible with it using libcdio or libvcdinfo. On Mac computers, this media player can grab audios and videos from EyeTV applications and other devices that capture EyeTV data. On GNU and Linux, it supports encoding cards that are compatible with V4L2 and MPEG-2 which are Visiontech Kfir and Hauppage WinTV-PVR 250-350.