VLC Portable 1.0 Puts Multi-Format Playing On Thumb Drives

If you do not need the media server functions of VLC Player, there is the much smaller MPlayer Portable at portableapps.com. This player also plays a wide variety of media formats, and loads much faster than VLC Player.

@Eruanno: If someone who doesn't have certain codecs on their computer because they don't feel they need them "is a douche", what is someone who doesn't have respect for other people's choices?

I've also experienced disappointment when I felt someone else's computer was in some way lacking, but rather than calling them names I simply suggested the improvement. Some were glad to have received the info, others didn't see the point, but it's their PC, their choice.

Can you add a tutorial on AirTunes support please?

Cant find this anywhere

resource

@WhACKSTER: I was wondering the same thing; the official archive weighs in at around 70 MB, whereas PortableApps' one is only around 20 MB.

gigandum

Very nice.

I'm in the process of seeing just how far I can push the portable app notion. I'm loading up a 16gb USB drive with VLC, FireFox 3.5, Notepad++ and all the other zero cost, portable programs I want handy.

One really useful development is a little launcher program I found (via LH?) called Appetizer. I configure my systems to use the USB at the same letter, and I then run Appetizer from it, which has links to all of the installed portables. I also wrote a few minimal BAT files to sync the USB drive with a dir on the system's hard drive, as well as do basic check-in/check-out stuff.

So far, it's all working very well, better than expected.

LouGrinzo

Ooooh, awesome! Now I can stop screaming bloody murder every time I'm at some other computer where the owner of said computer is a douche and hasn't installed all good-to-have codecs.
(Also, my USB drive is attached to my keychain which follows wherever my pants go)

I love portable apps, and thanks for the update, I've just re-installed the new version of this and Filezilla Portable.

Corinne Mi

Hadn't tried portable apps before so I decided to give it a try. Nice. I've got my fav apps on a USB drive and can use it on anyone else's PC without leaving a trace. Old news to most but new news to me. ;)

L0nerMan

@WhACKSTER: Simply: it keeps settings in the folder on your flash drive. No settings are saved to the computer you're using as long as you start the application with the Portable$App executable. Generally, applications designed to run on Windows XP/Vista/7 save settings to the registry and to the user directories instead of to their folder in $ProgramFilesDir. Hence, using a desktop application not designed to be portable becomes possible while maintaining privacy.

Abby_Normal

what's the difference with the archive you can download from the official VLC page??

Thanks for the heads up Kevin and John for always delivering.

ArJay

@Raiderboy23: We had it done within a few hours of the standard VLC release, but we were a bit delayed in getting the release and the word out due to a power outage at RackSpace. Enjoy!

:) Thanks Kevin. Just was asking about this in the other VLC thread yesterday!

If you launch vlc.exe with the command-line flags "--no-plugins-cache --config=vlcrc", it will store settings in a file named "vlcrc" in the same directory as vlc.exe. The easiest way to do this is to create a .bat file containing the following:

vlc.exe --no-plugins-cache --config=vlcrc

and use that to start vlc.

It will still store some trivial information in %APPDATA%: album art, if you've told it to download album art, plus window sizes and locations. The PortableApps treatment just redirects those in addition to the actual settings.

@gigandum: I don't know where you saw a 70 MB archive - the 7zip archive I downloaded was 14.4 MB, and the zip archive is reported by VideoLAN to be 31.1 MB. I don't know how big the PortableApps version is after "installation", but I'm pretty sure they're installers are 7zip archives, optimized for fast extraction.