VLC is an industry wide project, with video players and servers for every platform - and now Windows Phone too. Of course, Microsoft's own XBox Video client is pretty handy at playing back video files too, but VLC has extra codecs and goodies that may - one day - make it the go-to media player on this platform too. Not yet though. It's a free install, so why not do what I did and have a play? Regular updates and fix-ups are a given, of course.

From the Store description:

VLC media player is a portable, free and open-source, cross-platform media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project. VLC media player supports most audio and video compression formats, files and streaming protocols.

This is the first version of the port to Windows Phone.

In use, VLC - still labelled as 'beta' in the application list - is somewhat buggy and incomplete, but you can at least appreciate most of its interface and features. Not least, trying it with some of the more weird and wonderful video and audio codecs used by the media on your phone's microSD card?

Thumbnailed views of video and audio content on the phone - not complete though, by any means, yet... Yes, some of my music artwork may well be incomplete, but this phone had a hundred videos loaded, and only half a dozen showed in VLC.

When content plays, it plays well enough....

And then it all goes pearshaped, freezing, stuttering and corrupting....

Subtitle, multi-track and speed adjustment all bode well for the future...

VLC has always been able to handle 'streams', but the URLs are long, so hopefully you'll be able to paste something in from Internet Explorer! (right) there's a file browser for your microSD, letting you pick videos and other content manually...

You can download VLC here in the Store. Very early days, so be gentle in the comments!