It was intended to consist of a client and server to stream videos across a campus network. VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but since VLC is no longer simply a client, that initialism no longer applies. The VideoLan project was originally started as an academic project in 1996. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux and OS X by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library. Many of VLC's codecs are provided by the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses mainly its own muxer and demuxers and its own protocols. The default distribution of VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins. It is able to stream over computer network and to transcode multimedia files. VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-Video, video CD and streaming protocols.

VLC media player (informally just VLC) is a highly portable free and open-source cross-platform media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project. GNU General Public License v2 or later and LGPL Windows, OS X, iOS, Linux, Android, BSD, BeOS, OS/2, Solaris, Syllable, QNX

Vlc media player history