VLC is easily one of our favourite media players (and yours too). While it can handle nearly every movie you throw at it, it can also do so much more. You don’t need to be a power user to understand all of its incredible, built-in features; you just need to know they exist. And we’re happy to show you everything amazing VLC can do on your desktop PC.

News broke today that the VLC Media Player—immensely popular and Lifehacker-recommended—allegedly has a pretty severe bug that could allow allow a “booby-trapped” video, as The Register put it, to either crash the player or execute remote code. The former? An annoyance. The latter? A huge security issue, one that’d we recommend uninstalling VLC to address until its creator, VideoLAN, comes out with a patch.

The last place you'd expect to find malware — other than inside the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way — is the official Windows binaries for VLC, the free, ubiquitous media player. Yet, if you typed the name into Microsoft's Bing search engine a few days ago, you'd have been presented with a suspicious site warning. So, what went wrong?

VideoLAN and Huawei are in a fight. So much so, that you can no longer grab the ever-popular, feature-packed VLC media player app from the Google Play Store on Huawei smartphones — VideoLAN's nuclear option. But you can still download the VLC APK directly from VideoLAN and you should... with a few adjustments.

Today's popular container formats, such as Matroska (MKV), can hold multiple audio tracks, usually for different languages. It can be the case that the first track isn't English, which means you'll have to constantly change it over, especially if you've queued multiple videos. If you're using VLC, there is a way to fix this.

VLC, the Swiss Army knife of media players, has been updated to version 3.0.0. The latest version adds some much-needed features to the player, including one that could make streaming all that content from your computer to your living room TV a lot easier: Chromecast support (among other things).

If you've been hitting VLC's nightly builds, then most of the new features of v3.0.0 will be old news. For everyone else, the major update -- the first since 2.0.0 came out in 2012 -- adds loads of goodness, including native Chromecast support, hardware HEVC decoding and advanced network browsing. While VLC's website hasn't been updated, there's no need to wait: you can grab the official release right now.

VLC is one of the most popular media players around. It works on most platforms and can handle almost any type of file. It's damn near perfect, but you could be getting even more out of VLC by using experimental nightly builds instead of the official version.

Ever find yourself wondering whether you should use VLC media player or Media Player Classic? Going forward, the answer is easy - because the MPC-HC project has officially carked it.

It's hard to say if 360-degree videos will ever be more than a novelty -- especially with the rising popularity of VR -- but the folks behind VLC are confident it'll be around for a while, so much so the developers have pushed out a technical preview of VLC with support for 360-degree videos and photos.

VLC is already available for Windows 10, but this newly-released "Modern" beta runs on the Universal Windows Platform. That means it will get some special features, including Cortana support and live tiles, and it will be perfect for the Xbox One, Windows tablets and even HoloLens, when it's released.

Android: The Android version of VLC received a big update today, adding in a bunch of new features, including a picture-in-picture mode for tablets and playlists for videos.

The VLC app for Android has allowed you to stream videos across your network for a while, but it always required a direct link to the file. Now, the latest beta allows you to browse your folders on shared devices.

If you're planning on settling in for a weekend movie night over the next few days, you want to make sure that you're not having to change the volume every minute as the scenes change between quiet dialogue and REALLY LOUD action sequences. Here's how to fix that problem in a few different ways.

VLC is one of those fantastic little apps we've all come to love, and today Apple TV users can finally get in on the action with the new Apple TV app.

Android: VLC has slowly but surely been working to become as well-known for its Android app as it is for the desktop version. It's taken another step in that direction with background playback for videos on Android.

Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS: VLC is hands-down one of the best media players around and today it gets a little better by adding an in-app extensions store, playback resuming and more. More importantly, the iOS version of the app returns to the App Store.

Android: VLC has been one of our favourite media players for seemingly forever. After a lengthy stint in a beta (plus some region lock annoyances), the Android app finally graduated to version 1.0. It's now out of beta, though releasing on time is still up for debate.

Upon removal, a good program will give you the option to clear old settings, be they in a folder or the registry. This lets you get rid of every last remnant to calm your OCD, or troubleshoot issues caused by preferences from older versions. When you aren't given the ability to do this easily, you'll have to do some investigating yourself.