VideoLAN

VideoLAN is a non-profit organization which develops software for playing video and other media formats. 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.

Logo of VideoLAN
FormationApril 21, 2009 (2009-04-21)[1]
Founded atParis, France
TypeNon-profit organization
Legal statusAssociation loi de 1901
PurposeSoftware development and promotion of free software for multimedia
Headquarters18, rue Charcot, 75013, Paris, France
Coordinates48.8312°N 2.3716°E / 48.8312; 2.3716
Region
Worldwide
ServicesSoftware development
Official languages
English, French[2]
President
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
AffiliationsVideolabs[3]
Volunteers
List of volunteers
Websitewww.videolan.org
Common logo for all VideoLAN projects

The VideoLAN 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 40 nations.[4] The project has been completely separated from École Centrale Paris since 2009 when it was constituted as a non-profit organization.[5][1]

The current President of the VideoLAN non-profit organization is Jean-Baptiste Kempf, who is also one of the project's developers.[6]

Projects

VLC
Main article: VLC media player

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, BSD, Solaris, Chrome OS, and is widely used with over 2.1 billion downloads as of September 2017.[7]

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, x265 which can encode HEVC video, x262 which can encode MPEG-2 video, dav1d which can decode AV1 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

[4]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.[8]

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.[9]

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. VideoLAN doesn't have the money to sue the many companies abusing their trademarks.[10][11][12][13][14]

gollark: You don't have orbital bee strike access anyway.
gollark: ```Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>NameError: name 't' is not defined```
gollark: You wouldn't feel that way if faced with an orbital bee strike.
gollark: https://i.osmarks.tk/bees.png
gollark: There is no escape.

See also

References
  1. "VIDEOLAN". opencorporates.com. Retrieved 12 June 2018.
  2. "Legal". videolan.org. Retrieved 12 June 2018.
  3. "Our partners". videolan.org.
  4. VideoLAN team contact list
  5. "Free Software and Open Source video streaming solution for every OS!". videolan.org. Retrieved 12 June 2018. Since 2009, the project is completely separated from École Centrale Paris, and is driven by an autonomous non-profit organization.
  6. "VLC player rocks, and Jean-Baptiste Kempf talks about it!". Unixmen. 2012-05-14. Retrieved 2015-09-22.
  7. "Download Statistics". VideoLAN Project. Retrieved 2017-09-06.
  8. VLC Port to Neuros Linux Archived May 30, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  9. "VLC Media Player Videos 360°". 29 Nov 2016.
  10. "These companies that mislead our users". 7 Jul 2011.
  11. "VLC media player suffering in face of crapware and uncaring Google". Geek.com. 7 Jul 2011.
  12. "VideoLAN Calls Out for Help to Protect Users from VLC Scams". 16 Jul 2011.
  13. "Adware in new installer". The VideoLAN forums.
  14. "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.
  15. Open Source Patches and Mirrored Packages - Google Code
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