VLC Media Player and 3Sat Mediathek

I use VLC Media Player to watch videos and listen to audio podcasts. It will play just about anything you throw at it, including HD, and the great thing is it is a free download.
A neat trick I recently discovered is that if you have a link to a video stream on your clipboard you can get VLC to play it either from the Media menu >Open location from clipboard or by using the Ctrl-V combination when VLC has the focus. I find this particularly useful when looking at the 3Sat media offerings.

I take an RSS feed from 3Sat http://www.3sat.de/mediathek/rss/mediathek.xml which offers more than I can possibly view. Some of the videos are very short trailers, less than a minute, so they offer a brief taster of German language without you needing to get too serious. Then there are full programmes.

My favourite is nano and I've just watched yesterday's broadcast. The link to put on your clip board is http://hstreaming.zdf.de/3sat/veryhigh/100217_sendung_nano.mov If your internet connection cannot handle this stream go http://www.3sat.de/mediathek/?obj=16974 and you can then choose a lower connection speed - sellect Einstellungen towards the bottom right of the window and change the settings.

Another programme I watched recently was  hitec: Die Wettermacher - Lässt sich unser Klima kontrollieren? with spectacular images like the picture above. Highly recommended. The link for your clipboard is http://hstreaming.zdf.de/3sat/veryhigh/090713_wettermacher_hitec.mov Strangely this is billed as the complete programme from 21.02.2010 - We do time travel on this blog.