Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty!

[Puppy]

Dell says so http://en.community.dell.com/support-fo ... 92918.aspx

Another evidence that crappy hardware design is common these days.

[Medessec]

Well, it does make some slight sense that they'd do that, because VLC has a feature that lets you go beyond 100% volume, and even attempt 200% volume if you have the right version.

However-if you read some of the material that the above linked article spans off to- you can see that VLC shouldn't cause damage to speakers, because all it does is increase the average audible volume of whatever's being played. Meaning if you set an audio track to 200% volume, stuff that would normally be really quiet would be moderately loud, and stuff that would normally be moderately loud would be "hard clipped", so it would sound like a slightly louder garbled, fuzzy, disturbing mess. You should know what I'm talking about-if you've tried playing loud music through a crappy old speaker.

So really-playing an audio track at 200% volume in VLC is no different than playing an audio track that is a loud, garbled mess at 100% volume. If Dell is going to deny you service because you have VLC installed- it's really just that they're trying to save their pretty penny and then blame the problem on a program that gives the user that freedom... they're taking the easy way out basically. Don't let them take the easy way out. If you're a Dell owner and you encounter this problem-you should ask for a supervisor or manager if they tell you the same thing. Dell should want to help you, not tell you that you're why their laptop failed.

[Cigarguy]

In the infamous words from Spinal Tap, their volume control goes to 11. Cool!

[Saucey]

That sucks, I was watching Raid: The Reception and I couldn't hear a thing!
I was using Media Player Classic w/ codecs and I had to mess with the settings a bit.
I was able to hear the audio as if I was playing music normally.
One thing I dislike about movies sometimes is that they are really quiet with dialogue but have 'loud' action scenes.

In the infamous words from Spinal Tap, their volume control goes to 11. Cool!