Documentation:History

VLC 2.0 default interface, Windows

Overview of the VideoLAN project

VideoLAN is 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).

VideoLAN was originally 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.

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

VLC Media Player

Originally called VideoLAN Client, VLC media player is VideoLAN's main software.

VLC works on many platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Solaris, Familiar Linux, Yopy/Linupy, QNX and many more...

VLC Media Player in Windows:

VLC Media Player in Macintosh:

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.

Getting help

Documentation

The VideoLAN documentation is composed of three documents:

• The Play-Howto (for which this article is the introduction): The complete guide to the VLC media player.
• The Streaming Howto: The complete guide to VLC as a streaming server, including practical examples to set up a streaming solution.
• FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions about VideoLAN.

The latest version of these documents, in a variety of languages, can be found on the documentation page.

User support

There are different methods to get support from The VideoLAN team. For more details, please visit our Support page.

See Also

Documentation:VLC for dummies

This page is part of official VLC media player Documentation (User Guide • Streaming HowTo • Hacker Guide • Modules)
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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.