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Price: Free or 99 cents
Developer: Hobbyist Software
iTunes Links: VLC Remote Free | VLC Remote

For those who don’t know of it, VLC is cross-platform audio/video player with an enormous amount of codecs built into it. It is extremely rare to find an audio or video file that it can’t play. It’s also rather light in it’s use of system resources, despite the wide range of files it can play.

Now, a little about how this app works. Like Apple’s iTunes remote, you need to have your computer and iPhone on the same network. Before you can use either version, you first need to download and run a small application on the computers you wish to control VLC on. The application works with, and provides instructions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Obviously, you also need to have VLC installed.

Once that set-up is done, you’ll soon be on your way to becoming that much more of a digital couch potato. Simply open VLC on you’re computer and get something playing.

With the free app, you’ll be able to access the full range of playback controls like play/pause, skip forward and back through the current playlist, and even control the volume or scan through the video. There’s even a button to toggle full screen playback.

The paid version takes all this and throws in a major addition: playlist support. You can actually browse your computers file system and select files to play right from your iPhone. You can even queue up several files to play in order or shuffled.

On the downside this app certainly isn’t pretty to look at, but then neither is VLC itself. And like VLC, this app packs some serious power under the hood.

Tip: I found that I had to disable my firewall for the app to detect my computer, but when I ‘bookmarked’ the IP it would connect and work with the firewall active (but still wouldn’t show up in the scan).