VideoLAN
The History of VideoLAN
(this is still incomplete but it should give the background info people are likely to be looking for)
The VideoLAN project was started as a school project in 1996 by students of Ecole Centrale Paris, a French engineering school. 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.)
They began writing VLS (VideoLAN Server) and VLC (VideoLAN Client) to stream and read MPEG2 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.
Misc
The VideoLAN project's servers
