Do not install VLC.
Once you install it, you can never go back.
You will never pay 99 cents for a codec again.
You will never buy QuickTime Pro again.
You will never renew RealPlayer Plus again.
You will never pay for Blu-ray decoder software again.
You will never see the words "this file format is not supported" again.
You will become the family tech support person. Forever. Your dad will call you at 11 PM because he downloaded a .mkv from somewhere and Windows refuses to open it.
Your answer will always be the same. "Install VLC."
And then the orange traffic cone will eat his problem in 4 seconds and he will call you a genius.
You did not do that. A French student named Jean-Baptiste Kempf did, in 1996, as a school project at École Centrale Paris. His roommate brought a traffic cone home from the street that year. They made it the logo. 6 billion downloads later, the cone is still undefeated.
Repo:
github.com/videolan/vlc. 18,463 stars. GPL-2.0. Pushed today.
Here is the wildest part:
The warning is real. Just not for you.
Apple sold QuickTime Pro for $29.99. VLC killed it. Apple shut it down in 2016.
Microsoft sold Windows Media Center for $9.99. VLC killed it. Microsoft shut it down with Windows 10.
RealNetworks charged $39.99 a year for RealPlayer Plus. VLC killed it.
Sony built Blu-ray to need a $79.99 licensed decoder. VLC ships with libdvdcss and a French court ruling that protects it.
The codec mafia spent 30 years building a tollbooth on every video file on Earth.
A guy whose GitHub location is literally "Coneland" walked through every tollbooth with a cone on his head and never paid a cent.
He was offered millions of dollars to sell it. He said no.
So yes. Do not install VLC. The codec industry has not recovered from the last 6 billion people who did.
100% Opensource.
100% Free.
100% Yours.
The biggest media companies on Earth spent three decades trying to charge you to play your own files.
One French student and a cone he found on the street made all of it pointless.