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VLC Media Player Security Update

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:15:24 +0000

VLC Media Player is one of the most popular media players, next to Windows Media Player and MPlayer frontends. A high popularity usually has the downside that criminals try to find and exploit security vulnerabilities in the software or service. Several of the most recent updates of VLC were or did include security updates that fixed previously discovered security vulnerability in the application.

The developers of VLC have released a new version of the program yesterday that patches another security vulnerability in the program.

It took the VLC team less than five days to fix the vulnerability which was first disclosed on April 7. The security advisory on the Videolan web page describes the issue as a heap-based buffer overflow in the mp4 demuxer.

Workarounds have been posted on the very same page, which are however no longer necessary as the issue is fixed by the VLC update to version 1.1.9.

The built-in update checker does not seem to recognize the new update yet, which means that VLC users need to download the update from the homepage of the project to install the program update manually. Downloads for all supported operating systems are available on this page.

You can verify the version of VLC by clicking on Help > About in the program interface, or with the keyboard shortcut Shift-F1.

If you see VLC Media Player 1.1.8 there you need to update the software. Manual update checks are available via Help > Check for Updates. It is likely that the developers will enable automatic updates soon.

VLC 1.1.9 includes an update for the libmodplug which is security related as well.

A VLC alternative called SMPlayer

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:03:54 +0000

One of my regular readers CC send me a link to SMPlayer about a week ago and I was testing the frontend for mplayer since. SMPlayer is a video player that is supporting the most important video formats out of the box including avi, mpg, mov, wmv and vob plus numerous other formats.

It is also possible to play DVDs and Internet streams with the video player that is available for Windows and Linux. Several ways of displaying subtitles and various subtitle formats are supported including srt, sub and DVD subtitles. I personally think that SMPlayer is a great alternative to the VLC player.

This could be useful for everyone who is having troubles with VLC for example. The only real difference that I was able to spot was that the SMPlayer is Open Source and that it remembers where the playback of the video stopped. Make sure you download the full SMPlayer plus the update.

VLC Media Player 0.86b Test 1

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 09:58:10 +0000

The VideoLan team has upped a first test version of VLC Media Player 0.86b which happens to be my favorite media player. The new version fixes some crashes, adds VP31 decoding to Windows platforms and Direct3D Video Output modifications for Vista compatibility. You can download this version right from the VideoLan ftp site; Simply select the version for your operating system (Win,Mac,Linux) and install it. I had no problems using the new version. If you experience crashes you might want to try this new version out.

VLC Media Player is one of the few players that is able to play most file types out of the box without the need for additional codecs or plugins. It does not use a lot of processing power or ram even when playing large video files. A 700 megabyte testfile used about 32 megabytes of ram and most of the time 0-2 processing power. Media Player Classic used less ram on the files (24.6) but between 18-28 processing power. So, if you are looking for a new media player to switch to give VLC a try, it is worth it.