VideoLAN
VideoLAN is a project that develops software for playing video and other media formats across a local area network (LAN).
Contents
Description
VideoLAN was 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.
The current President of the VideoLAN non-profit organization which maintains the project's website is Jean-Baptiste Kempf, who is also one of the project's developers.
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, Linux, BeOS, Syllable, BSD, MorphOS, Solaris and Sharp Zaurus, and is widely used with over 300 million downloads as of November 2009.
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.
Opposition to Unwanted Programs
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.
See also
- Google Videos — used VideoLAN technology in its media player web browser plugin.
- Comparison of audio player software
- Comparison of video player software
External links
- VideoLAN @ Wikipedia
- Official website
