Documentation:History

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 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 Unicast, UDP Multicast (MPEG-TS), HTTP, RTP/RTSP, MMS, etc.
• From acquisition or encoding cards (on GNU/Linux and Windows only)

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)
• The VideoLAN 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.

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.