VLC is awesome and is, in fact, worth the price. However, on a standard Win7 and every other platform, it's free. Given the severe obscurity of 8.1 RT, I recognize development costs have to be recovered, or something, in order to satisfy the demands of the 11 people who begged loudly for it. I think the price is more of a coded warning: "Beware! Here be dragons!"

...Wednesday to be exact. A Wholesaler had a drawing after a vendor event. Last year I won my iPad at the same event. I also own a Nexus 7, and was willing to give this Microsoft Tablet a go. At the very least it could be used as a HTPC lite or something. It's 1080P output via a Micro HDMI port was beautiful, and a full-size USB port was a bonus, as was the Micro SD slot. The lower-rez screen was a disappointment. After 24 hours and a concerted effort to find a use-case for it, I quickly grew to hate the thing. The apps were poor and half-baked, the live-tiles became annoying, and apps that I love and need weren't available for the platform, yet were available on all of my other devices. VLC Media Player was $13.99 or something close to it. The Interface is, for me, a great big bucket of suck. Luckily, I upgraded to 8.1 and the thing promptly borked. Even with the volume off, it emitted an annoying whiny buzz when keys were pressed (I bought - and returned - a keyboard cover) or when it booted, or when you swiped the screen. The wholesaler gave me a Best-Buy gift receipt with it, so when I returned the godawful thing on Friday, I came away with a $397 store gift card. This will be applied to a nice DSLR camera sometime in December.