A video player is a software application which presents the imagery and audio of a video stream from a physical media such as a DVD or Bluray disk or digital media such as a data stream from software generating video imagery from a file or device such as a web cam. This tag should be used for questions about the video player software that is presenting the imagery to a viewer. The question should include the name of the software and the operating system.
A video player (also known as media player) " is a computer program for playing multimedia files like videos, movies and music."
Video and audio data come in a wide variety of protocols requiring that a particular video source much be matched with the codec that can convert the data into imagery.
There are both free and non-free video player applications available for the big five operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS, Linux, Apple iOS, and Android.
The most established web browsers also provide video player capabilities for streaming video. However there are cases where a browser does not provide support for a particular protocol. One well known example is that the Chrome web browser contains the widevine plugin component from Widevine Technologies used by Netflix and others for streaming video while the Chromium browser does not.
