Documentation:History

Overview of the VideoLAN project

VideoLAN was a complete software solution for video streaming and playback, developed by students of the Ecole Centrale Paris and developers from all over the world, under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

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

More details about the project can be found on the VideoLAN Web site.

VLC Media Player

VLC 2.0 default interface, Windows

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. This feature is described in the Streaming HowTo.

This guide describes all the playback (client) aspects of VLC media player.

This page is part of official VLC media player Documentation (User Guide • Streaming HowTo • Hacker Guide • Modules)
Please read the Documentation Editing Guidelines before you edit the documentation

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.