Update 2013-04-11: Thanks to Felix Paul Kühne, lead developer of VLC for Mac, this feature has been added to VLC 2.0.6 without the need for the user to make any changes to the app. If you use ...

To use VLC Player, right-click over the file you want to play and from the menu that appears, select "Open With" and then "VLC Player." That will launch the file in the player.

I then played the file on a laptop on the network running VLC, even before the host computer was finished transcoding the DVD to the file.

The PC geek's beloved video player, VLC, has finally landed on the modern side of Windows 8.