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 in 1996 by students of Ecole Centrale Paris, a French engineering school. These students wanted to be able to watch television in their PCs. (They also wanted to upgrade the VIA Centrale Réseaux network so they needed some bandwidth intensive application to justify the upgrade.)

They thus began writing VLS (VideoLAN Server) and VLC (VideoLAN Client) to stream and read MPEG2 streams. They succeeded serving and reading the first stream in 1998. These two software were planed 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 negociation, 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 latter !

The first large scale multicast streaming tests occured 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.