VideoLAN is a

non-profit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

which develops software for playing video and other media formats. It originally developed two programs for media

streaming Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content it ...

, VideoLAN Client (VLC) and VideoLAN Server (VLS), but most of the features of VLS have been incorporated into VLC, with the result renamed VLC media player. The VideoLAN project began as a student endeavor at École Centrale Paris (France), but after releasing the software under the

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

, the project is now multinational with a development team spanning 40 nations. The project has been completely separated from École Centrale Paris since 2009 when it was constituted as a non-profit organization. The current President of the VideoLAN non-profit organization is Jean-Baptiste Kempf, who is also one of the project's developers.

Projects

VLC

VLC (standing for VideoLAN Client) is a

portable Portable may refer to: General * Portable building, a manufactured structure that is built off site and moved in upon completion of site and utility work * Portable classroom, a temporary building installed on the grounds of a school to provide a ...

multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

s as well as

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kin ...

s, VCDs, and various

protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design la ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users a ...

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

Solaris Solaris may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...

, ChromeOS, and is widely used with over 4.2 billion downloads as of October 2022.

VLMC

VLMC (standing for VideoLAN Movie Creator) is a cross-platform,

non-linear In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and many other ...

, video editing

software application Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

based on the VLC Media Player. The software is still in early development. The latest version is 0.2.0 (released 2014-10-30), released under the GPLv2 license.

VLS

The VLS (standing for VideoLAN Server) project was originally intended to be used as a server for streaming videos. It has since been merged with the VLC project, and use of VLS is not encouraged.

Codecs

The VideoLAN project also hosts several audio/video

decoding Decoding or decode may refer to: is the process of converting code into plain text or any format that is useful for subsequent processes. Science and technology * Decoding, the reverse of encoding * Parsing, in computer science * Digital-to-analog ...

and decryption libraries, such as

libdvdcss libdvdcss (or libdvdcss2 in some repositories) is a free and open-source software library for accessing and unscrambling DVDs encrypted with the Content Scramble System (CSS). libdvdcss is part of the VideoLAN project and is used by VLC media p ...

which allows the content of

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

protected

s to be unscrambled,

x264 x264 is a free and open-source software library and a command-line utility developed by VideoLAN for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. History ...

which can encode H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video,

x265 x265 is a software codec for creating digital video streams in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) video compression format developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). It is available as a command-line app or a ...

which can encode

HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In compari ...

video,

x262 X, or x, is the twenty-fourth and third-to-last Letter (alphabet), letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its English a ...

which can encode

MPEG-2 video H.262 or MPEG-2 Part 2 (formally known as ITU-T Recommendation H.262 and ISO/IEC 13818-2, also known as MPEG-2 Video) is a video coding format standardised and jointly maintained by ITU-T Study Group 16 Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and ISO/ ...

, dav1d which can decode

AV1 AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 that ...

video,

libdca libdca (formerly libdts) is a free library for decoding DTS Coherent Acoustics streams. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and is developed by Gildas Bazin of the VideoLAN team. The library is based on the DTS Coher ...

which can decode DTS audio, and the git

repository Repository may refer to: Archives and online databases * Content repository, a database with an associated set of data management tools, allowing application-independent access to the content * Disciplinary repository (or subject repository), an ...

of the multimedia framework FFmpeg.

VLMa

A new project has been developed, called VLMa (standing for VideoLAN Manager). VLMa is an application to manage broadcasts of TV channels, received through digital terrestrial or satellite ways. Its interface is provided as a web-site written in Java. It is also capable of streaming audio and video files. VLMa consists of a daemon (called VLMad) and a web interface (called VLMaw). VLMa is released under the GNU General Public License like VLC media player.

VLC media player Skin Editor

The VLC Skin Editor is a simple program developed by VideoLAN. The simple interface allows users to create new skins for the VLC media player without knowledge of the VLC Skins2 XML System. The program lets users change features on the main window, playlist window, and equalizer window.

Commercial use

In May 2008,

Neuros Technology Neuros Technology was a Chicago, Illinois–based company that produced a number of audio and video devices under the brand name Neuros. Founded by Joe Born in 2001 as a division of Digital Innovations, it previously operated under the name Neur ...

and

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globall ...

began work on a port of VideoLAN to their next generation open set-top box. VLC is currently used in products through the use of libVLC and also as raw or customized VLC for Android versions on devices. Some features have been publicly merged, such as 360° support.

Opposition to software-bundling

VideoLAN developers have expressed dismay at how users searching for their products see search advertising from websites that use

unwanted software bundling A potentially unwanted program (PUP) or potentially unwanted application (PUA) is software that a user may perceive as unwanted or unnecessary. It is used as a subjective tagging criterion by security and parental control products. Such software ma ...

to modify official download files with wrappers that include unwanted programs. VideoLAN does not have the money to sue the many companies abusing their trademarks.

References

External links

* {{Video editors Free software project foundations Free software projects Multimedia software Non-profit organizations based in France Portable software Software DVD players Streaming