VideoLAN

Common logo for all VideoLAN projects

VideoLAN is a project that develops software for playing video and other media formats across a local area network (LAN). It originally developed two programs for media streaming, 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 project began as a student endeavor at École Centrale Paris (France), but after releasing the software under the free software/open source GNU General Public License, the project is now multinational with a development team spanning 20 nations.^[1]

The current President of the VideoLAN non-profit organization who maintains the project's website is Jean-Baptiste Kempf, who is also one of the project's developers.^[2]

Projects

VLC

VLC (standing for VideoLAN Client) is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming 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, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Linux, BeOS, Syllable, BSD, MorphOS, Solaris, Chrome, and Sharp Zaurus, and is widely used with over 300 million downloads as of November 2009.^[3]

VLMC

VLMC (standing for VideoLAN Movie Creator) is a cross-platform, non-linear, video editing software application 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. But now, it has been merged with the VLC project and use of VLS is not encouraged.

Codecs

The VideoLAN project also hosts several audio/video decoding and decryption libraries, such as libdvdcss which allows the content of CSS protected DVDs to be unscrambled, x264 which can encode H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video, libdca which can decode DTS audio and the git repository 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. The current version is 2.0.8 and can be downloaded on the videolan.org website.

Commercial use

In May 2008, Neuros Technology and Texas Instruments began work on a port of VideoLAN to their next generation open set-top box.^[4]

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 to modify official download files with wrappers that include unwanted programs, while VideoLAN doesn't have the money to sue the many companies abusing their trademarks.^{[5][6][7][8][9]}

See also

• Google Videos — used VideoLAN technology in its media player web browser plugin.^[10]
• Comparison of audio player software
• Comparison of video player software

References

1. VideoLAN team contact list
2. "VLC player rocks, and Jean-Baptiste Kempf talks about it!". Unixmen. 2012-05-14. Retrieved 2015-09-22.
3. "Download Statistics". VideoLAN Project. Retrieved 2009-10-13.
4. VLC Port to Neuros Linux
5. "These companies that mislead our users". 7 Jul 2011.
6. "VLC media player suffering in face of crapware and uncaring Google". Geek.com. 7 Jul 2011.
7. "VideoLAN Calls Out for Help to Protect Users from VLC Scams". 16 Jul 2011.
8. "Adware in new installer". The VideoLAN forums.
9. "Yes, Every Freeware Download Site is Serving Crapware (Here’s the Proof)". HowToGeek.com. 21 Jan 2015. Sadly, even on Google all the top results for most open source and freeware are just ads for really terrible sites that are bundling crapware, adware, and malware on top of the installer. Most geeks will know that they shouldn’t click on the ads, but obviously enough people are clicking those ads for them to be able to afford to pay the high per-click prices for Google AdWords.
10. Open Source Patches and Mirrored Packages - Google Code

External links

• Official website