Thursday, October 14, 2010

Spotlight: VLC

You probably have VLC. It's that traffic-cone-shaped program that plays absolutely any video you throw at it. No doubt you haven't even thought about it in the last few years, since it just does its job with fewer problems than just about any application ever built.

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But if you have thought about it, the answers to all your question about this 21st century marvel are likely held in this article about VLC by some douchebag or other. In case you were particularly wondering about the traffic cone:

One drunken night, an École Centrale student stole a traffic cone and brought it back to the lab. The trend caught on, and soon an enormous collection had been stockpiled. It's easy to imagine that it became impossible to take video on campus without a traffic cone in the frame; but whatever the reasoning, when it came time to release VLC into the world, no other symbol had quite the same resonance as the by-now-ubiquitous cone.

2 comments:

  1. haha cool, i had no idea. honestly, vlc blows my mind- it plays everything, all the time. its always the third or fourth thing i install on a new computer.

    cool that you got to talk to the guy, too. note to self: present him with a traffic cone if he ever stops by dc.

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  2. Yeah! VLC is so awesome.

    What's also great is that stealing traffic cones is something we did in college too! I mentioned this story to a friend and she was like "Well, that's relatable."

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