VideoLAN

VideoLAN is a project of the French engineering school École Centrale Paris, Chatenay -Malabry, near Paris. In collaboration with independent developers from over 20 countries and former students of the school developed an open source VideoLAN streaming solution for digital audio and video formats. The project has about 50 members, of which about 15 to 20 work regularly.

All work covered by the GNU General Public License, this means it can be viewed by anyone, transmitted, used, and improved.

System Support

It supports both 32- bit and 64- bit versions of Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Subprojects

VideoLAN is composed of several sub- projects:

The streaming solution

The original streaming solution consists of the VideoLAN Server and the VLC media player. In order for the streaming of digital TV content, DVDs and MPEG & DivX movie files was possible on the campus of Ecole Centrale Paris. Meanwhile, both programs have been extended to also streaming over the Internet can be realized. Here, a variety of protocols are supported, such as UDP, RTP, HTTP, MMS, etc. There are both IPv4 and IPv6 address ranges are available, as well as the two different streaming options unicast and multicast. VLC now supports also video on demand, so that it can easily compete with Streaming solutions by commercial providers. It is used commercially at the time by several companies, such as the French ISP Free or streaming the Dutch company First Mile TV.

Through the further development of the VLC media player to its own streaming server, the concept of the solution was softened since January 2003. An indirect consequence of this is that the solution also by users without much prior knowledge can be used, because the VLC media player as opposed to the VideoLAN Server via a graphical interface features.

More

The VideoLAN project operates in his own words one of the best end-user support of the open source media player scene. This is due to the fact that users will get to your questions within 24 hours qualified responses from the core developers and other active members. The user can choose depending on the urgency and nature of the question between four different ways to contact us.

The different projects of the open source software scene for the creation of media players, such as xine, MPlayer and VideoLAN each other in a friendly competition mainly. It is often the same program libraries such as FFmpeg for similar purposes.

Jon Lech Johansen, the Norwegian programmer who was known by circumventing the CSS protection playback of DVDs and used in the iTunes Music Store DRM system FairPlay, is a member of the VideoLAN team.