To open a stream using the graphical interface, click on either : "File" to open a file stored on your hard drive. "Disc" to read a DVD or a VCD. "Network" to read a network UDP stream or an HTTP stream. "Satellite" to read directly from a satellite card. These four buttons, as well as the ones located in the "File" menu, actually open the same dialog box, but on different tabs. You can specify directly the Media Resource Locator MRL, if you know the syntax that you have to use, but you may also use the different tabs, that will fill it automatically. For a File, this is very simple, you only have to fill the path to the file. For a Disc, you select the type of the disk, the path to the drive (looks like /dev/dvd on Unix, or D: on Windows), and the starting title and chapter. For a Network stream : if you use unicast mode, select UDP and the port used, if you use multicast, select UDP multicast, enter the multicast address and the port ; if you have a channel information service with mini-VLCS, select Channel server, and give its address ; if you use HTTP streaming to do Video On Demand, select HTTP and give the address of your stream. For a Satellite stream, you have to give the frequency, the rate, the polarization, and the FEC of your stream. You have at your disposal all the classical control of a video player. For example when playing local streams or HTTP streams, you can pause, speed up or slow down the stream, go forth and back... Just use the corresponding buttons. To go fullscreen, you can select the right options in the view menu, or press f. To go back to the normal mode, press f. When reading a DVD or a VCD, you can change chapter and titles as you wish either by using the right-click menu or by using the options in the "Parameters" menu. These options are enabled only when you play a disk, or a disk through the network. When reading a multiprogram stream, you can change the current program by selecting it in the "View/Programs" submenu on the bar, or by using the "right click" menu from the video output window. You can also change the title and the chapter by the same way. In DVDs, if different angles are availables, they will be treated as different programs. At any time you can change the audio/subtitles channel using either the "setting" menu from the interface or using the "right click" menu from the video output window. By choosing "Preferences" in the "Settings" menu, you will open the preferences window. This window is generated dynamically according to the modules that were compiled. In every tab, you may click on "Save" to store your settings in your configuration file. (you can find it in ~/.vlc/vlcrc on Unix/Linux systems, or in Application Data\vlc\vlcrc In that tab, you can select which interface you would like to use on next start. Click on the choosen interface, click on Select then on Save. There can be some configuration options available by clicking Configure. This depends on the interface chosen. There are also a few generic settings, like color message or setting the verbosity level of the logs. You can also specify the path to the interface or to the plugin if they are not in the default directory. [FIX : compare with settings on other OS, where is the default file?] In this tab, you can select and configure the audio output you would like to use on next start (this works juste like for the interface). You may also specify other settings such as enabling or disabling the audio output, the output volume level, the audio frequency, the number of channels on output, add desynchronization, or set audio output format and headphone spazialization effect. In this tab, you can select which video output will be used on next start, and add a video filter module, which means a filter that will alter the rendered image. For more information on modules, please look the Modules section. You may also specify some video settings, such as the window size, if you would like fullscreen display or the video zoom. By using the adjust video filter module, you will be able to modify the Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Hue of the video output. There are also specific modules as wall which cut the output in many windows to make a video wall, transform module to rotate the image or invert module to invert the colors (who said it's useless?) In this tab, you can enter the input method with options by default that will be used on next start. Note that these are only default options, which means that they will be written in the appropriate field, but, you can of course change them. You can configure the default addresses and port for network streaming : the server port for UDP streaming, the server port for UDP multicast streaming the channel server adress and the channel server if you have a channel information service based on mini-VLCS. Here you also can choose which network interface the videolan client will use to get the stream and the address of this interface. The other options allow you to choose audio, channel, subtitles, the device of the DVD, the device of the VCD and the IP protocol of the stream (IPv6 or IPv4). In this tab, you can select which decoder (codec) you want to use for audio or video decoders. VLC normally automatically detects the right codec to use, so be sure to know what you are doing. In this tab you can configure the stream output capabilities. Stream output is a new feature of VLC which allow you to save the stream that you are watching to a file, or to stream it in unicast or multicast. This tab allows you to set up some options for this. You will be able to select the muxer used for the stream, ie PS, TS or AVI. PS and TS are parts of the MPEG norm. PS stands for Program Stream, it is usually used for files, whereas TS stands for Transport Stream, which is rather used for network streams. AVI means output to an AVI file or stream. You may also select the access output, i.e. what the strem will be output to. You can choose beetween UDP (network stream) or file. The Packetizer is the format of the output. You can also enable or disable audio or video. This tab is dedicated to enabling or disabling support for CPU extensions: MMX support (every processors since Pentium MMX), 3D! Now Support (for AMD K6-2, K6-3, Athlon and Duron processors), MMX EXT support, and SSE support (for Pentium III and Pentium IV processors). In this tab, you can select some playlist options, such as looping the playlist, automatically launching the playlist on VLC's start, enqueue items in it or randomly read the files. In this tab, you can select which memcpy version you want to use. Some of them uses MMX or 3Dnow! extensions. You can also select the access module (module used to get the stream) and the the demux module (used to ... demux the stream). This window is available by clicking on Messages in the View menu. It shows all the debug messages of VLC. If you have a problem with VLC, don't hesitate to open this window, as it may contain an interesting error message. VLC includes a simple playlist management system. By using the buttons which are in the playlist window, you can easily add or remove streams (whether these are files, disks, network streams, or satellites streams).