VideoLAN’s History

The VideoLAN project was started as a school project in 1996 by students of Ecole Centrale Paris, a French engineering school in 1996. These students wanted to be able to watch television on their PCs. They also wanted to upgrade the VIA Centrale Réseaux network so they needed a bandwidth intensive application to justify the upgrade. So they began writing VLS (VideoLAN Server) and the VLC (VideoLAN Client) to stream and read MPEG-2 streams. They succeeded in serving and reading the first stream in 1998. These two programs were planned to be modular, which meant a core consisting basically of communication functions to be used by the modules. This allowed easy porting of the OS specific modules.

In 2001, after many months (if not years) of negotiation, the school’s Director agreed to a change to the GPL licence. Developers from all around the world started working on the project right away. One of them (gibalou) even submitted the Win32 port 6 months later! The first large scale multicast streaming tests occurred in May 2002. 500 students on the VIA Centrale Réseaux network were able to participate in these tests. In January 2003, the first MPEG4 streams were tested and realtime MPEG4 encoding was available two months later.

Overview of the VideoLAN project

The project started to open up to developers outside of the École. It is now a worldwide project with developers from 40 countries. Since 2009, the project is completely separated from École Centrale Paris, and is driven by an autonomous non-profit organization.

VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client when VLC was a client of the VideoLAN project. Now, the initialism no longer applies because VLC is no longer merely a client. Originally VideoLAN was designed to stream MPEG videos on high-bandwidth networks, but VideoLAN’s main software, VLC media player, has evolved to become a full-featured, cross-platform media player. Now, the Non-Profit Organisation developing and offering the VLC media player is called: VideoLAN Organisation.

VLC Media Player

Originally called VideoLAN Client, VLC media player is VideoLAN’s main software product. VLC media player works on many platforms: Linux, Windows, macOS, BeOS, BSD, Solaris, Android, iOS, QNX and many more… It supports the following video and audio formats: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX, h264, webm, mkv, DVDs, VCDs, Audio CDs, wmv and wma. It can also play from external sources:

  • Satellite.

  • Cable.

  • Digital TV cards (DVB-S, DVB-T).

  • Several types of network streams: UDP/RTP Unicast, UDP/RTP Multicast, HTTP, RTSP, MMS, etc.

  • Acquisition or encoding cards.

  • Webcams and other devices.

  • VLC can also be used as a streaming server.