Documentation:History

VLC Interface on Windows 7.

General Interface Description

VLC has several interfaces:

• A cross-platform interface for Windows and GNU/Linux, which is called wxWidgets
• A native Mac OS X interface
• An interface which supports skins for both Windows and GNU/Linux.

Below are screenshots of VLC on various interfaces. Despite these different interfaces, VLC's functions essentially work the same on all operating systems.

Windows and GNU/Linux (wxWidgets)

The interface shown below is the default for Windows and GNU/Linux (although this screenshot is from Windows, it will look similar on GNU/Linux).

Default interface of VLC in Windows

VLC media player

Originally called VideoLAN Client (but is now no longer a 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 and QNX.

It can play:

• MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files from a hard disk, a CD-ROM drive, and so on
• DVDs, VCDs, and Audio CDs
• From satellite cards (DVB-S)
• Several types of network streams: UDP/RTP Unicast, UDP/RTP Multicast, HTTP, RTSP, MMS, etc.
• From acquisition or encoding cards (on GNU/Linux and Windows only)

For more details, regarding the playback features of VLC media player, please visit the Features page.

VLC can also be used as a streaming server. These aspects are detailed in the Streaming HowTo.

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

Getting help

Documentation

The VideoLAN documentation is made up of four 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.
• The VLS user guide: The complete guide for VLS (VideoLAN's legacy streaming server)
• 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, including IRC and mail. For more details, please visit our Support page. Users can also visit our Official FAQ Page for more help.

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.