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VLC media player

VLC media player (previously known as the VideoLAN Client and simply VLC) is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server created by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for both desktop and mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, and iPadOS. VLC can also be found on digital distribution platforms like Apple's App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store.

Many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-Video, Video CD, and streaming protocols, are supported by VLC. It can stream media across computer networks and transcode multimedia files.

VLC's default distribution includes many free decoding and encoding libraries, eliminating the need to locate and calibrate proprietary plugins. Many of VLC's codecs are provided by the FFmpeg project's libavcodec library, but the player primarily employs its own muxers and demuxers. It has its own protocol implementations as well. It was also the first player to support encrypted DVD playback on Linux and macOS by utilizing the libdvdcss DVD decryption library; however, this library is legally controversial and is not included in many Linux distributions' software repositories as a result. It is available for iOS under the MPLv2 license.

VLC media player history

In 1996, the VideoLAN software began as a French academic project. When VLC was a client of the VideoLAN project, VLC used to stand for "VideoLAN Client." That initialism no longer applies because VLC is no longer merely a client. It was designed to be a client and server that would stream videos from satellite dishes across a campus network. Originally created by students at the École Centrale Paris, it is now created by contributors all over the world and is coordinated by VideoLAN, a non-profit organization. 

It was rewritten from the ground up in 1998 and released under the GNU General Public License on February 1, 2001, with permission from the headmaster of the École Centrale Paris. The functionality of the server program, VideoLan Server (VLS), has been mostly absorbed into VLC and is no longer supported. Because there is no longer a client/server infrastructure, the project name has been changed to the VLC media player.

The VLC cone icon is inspired by the traffic cones collected by the École Centrale Networking Students' Association. In 2005, Richard instead illustrated a change in the cone icon design from a hand-drawn low-resolution icon to a higher resolution CGI-rendered version.

For license compatibility reasons, the VLC project decided not to upgrade to the recently released GPLv3 in 2007. On July 7, 2009, the VLC media player version 1.0.0 was released after 13 years of development. VLC for Android development began in 2010, and it has been available on the Google Play store for Android devices since 2011. In September 2010, a company called "Applidium" created a VLC port for iOS under GPLv2 with the VLC project's approval, which Apple accepted for their App Store.

Apple removed the VLC from the Apple App Store in January 2011, following VLC developer Rémi Denis-complaint Courmont's to Apple about a licensing conflict between the VLC's GPLv2 and the App Store's policies. Following that, in October 2011, the VLC authors began to relicense the engine parts of VLC from the GPL-2.0-or-later to the LGPL-2.1-or-later to achieve better license compatibility, such as with the Apple App Store. 

In July 2013, the VLC application could be resubmitted to the iOS App Store under the MPL-2.0 license. VLC media player 2.0.0 was released on February 18, 2012. On March 13, 2014, the Windows Store version was released. Later, support for Windows RT, Windows Phone, and Xbox One was added. VLC is the third most downloaded program on sourceforge.net, with over 3 billion downloads as of 2016.

Version 3.0 has been in development since June 2016 for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and it was released in February 2018. Chromecast output support (except for subtitles), hardware-accelerated decoding, 4K and 8K playback, 10-bit and HDR playback, 360° video and 3D audio, audio passthrough for HD audio codecs, Blu-ray Java menu support, and local network drive browsing are among the many new features.

The European Parliament approved a budget in December 2017 that funds a bug bounty program for VLC in order to improve the EU's IT infrastructure.

VLC media player with a modular design

VLC, like most multimedia frameworks, has a modular design that makes it simple to add modules/plugins for new file formats, codecs, interfaces, or streaming methods. VLC 1.0.0 includes over 380 modules. Depending on the situation, the VLC core generates its own graph of modules: input protocol, input file format, input codec, video card capabilities, and other parameters. Interfaces, video and audio outputs, controls, scalers, codecs, and audio/video filters are all modules in VLC.

VLC media player interfaces

The default GUI is based on Be API on BeOS, Cocoa on macOS, and Qt 4 on Linux and Windows, but they all provide a similar standard interface. On Linux and Windows, the previous default GUI was based on wxWidgets. VLC supports highly customizable skins via the skins2 interface, as well as Winamp 2 and XMMS skins. Skins are not supported in the macOS version. VLC includes ncurses, remote control, and telnet console interfaces. There is also an HTTP interface, as well as interfaces for mouse gestures and keyboard hotkeys.

Interfaces for VLC media players are included.

VLC media player Effects (desktop version)

The desktop version of the VLC media player includes filters for distorting, rotating, splitting, deinterlacing, and mirroring videos, as well as for creating display walls and adding a logo overlay during playback. Video can also be output as ASCII art.

During playback, an interactive zoom feature allows you to magnify the video. Images can still be extracted at their original resolution from the video, and individual frames can be stepped through, but only in the forward direction.

Playback can be made more interactive by dividing the image inside the viewport into draggable puzzle pieces, with the row and column counts adjustable.

VLC media player formats

VLC is a packet-based media player that can play almost any video format. Even damaged, incomplete, or unfinished files, such as those still downloading via a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, can be played. It also plays m2t MPEG transport streams (.TS) files while they are being digitized from an HDV camera via a FireWire cable, allowing you to monitor the video as it plays. The player can also use libcdio to access.iso files, allowing users to play files from a disk image even if their operating system does not support.iso images.

VLC supports all audio and video formats that libavcodec and libavformat support. This means that VLC can play back H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 2 video, as well as FLV or MXF file formats "out of the box" by leveraging FFmpeg's libraries. Alternatively, VLC has codec modules that are not based on the FFmpeg libraries. 

VLC is a free software DVD player that ignores DVD region coding on RPC-1 firmware drives, allowing it to be region-free. It does not, however, do the same on RPC-2 firmware drives because region coding is enforced by the drive itself; however, it can still brute-force the CSS encryption to play a foreign-region DVD on an RPC-2 drive.

The VLC media player can play high-definition recordings of D-VHS tapes that have been duplicated to a computer using CapDVHS.exe. This provides an additional method for archiving all D-VHS tapes with the DRM copy freely tag. VLC can stream live, unencrypted content to a monitor or HDTV via a FireWire connection from cable boxes to computers. By using DirectX, which is only available on Windows operating systems, the VLC media player can display the playing video as the desktop wallpaper, similar to Windows DreamScene.

The VLC media player can record the desktop and save the stream as a file, allowing the user to create screencasts. VLC also supports the Direct Media Object (DMO) framework on Microsoft Windows, allowing it to use some third-party DLLs (Dynamic-link library). VLC can tune into and view DVB-C, DVB-T, and DVB-S channels on the majority of platforms. On macOS, a separate EyeTV plugin is required, whereas, on Windows, the card's BDA Drivers are required.

VLC can be installed or run directly from a USB flash drive or another external storage device. VLC can be extended via scripting; it makes use of the Lua scripting language. VLC can play AVCHD videos, a highly compressed format used in recent HD camcorders. VLC can produce a variety of music visualization displays. The program can convert media files into a variety of supported formats.

An audio equalizer is included in both the desktop and mobile releases.

VLC media player operating system compatibility

The VLC media player is cross-platform, with versions for Windows, Android, Chrome OS, BeOS, Windows Phone, iOS, iPad, macOS, tvOS, OS/2, Linux, and Syllable. However, forward and backward compatibility between versions of the VLC media players and different versions of operating systems is not maintained beyond a few generations. 64-bit builds are available for 64-bit Windows.

VLC media player is supported by Windows 8 and 10.

The VLC port for Windows 8 and Windows 10 is being supported by a Kickstarter campaign to add support for a new GUI based on Microsoft's Metro design language, which will run on the Windows Runtime. Windows 8 includes all of the existing features, such as video filters, subtitle support, and an equalizer. On March 13, 2014, a beta version of VLC for Windows 8 was released to the Microsoft Store. A universal app for Windows 8, 8.1, 10, Windows Phone 8, 8.1, and Windows 10 Mobile was developed.

VLC media player is supported by Android.

In May 2012, the VLC team announced that an Android version of VLC was in the works. On December 8, 2014, Google Play made the stable release version 1.0 available.

VLC media player browser plugins

VLC includes an NPAPI plugin for Windows, Linux, macOS, and some other Unix-like platforms, allowing users to view QuickTime, Windows Media, MP3, and Ogg files embedded in websites without the need for additional software. It works with a variety of web browsers, including Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite, and other Netscape plug-in-based browsers; Safari, Chrome, and other WebKit-based browsers; and Opera. Google used this plugin to create the Google Video Player web browser plugin before switching to Adobe Flash.

Beginning with version 0.8.2, VLC includes an ActiveX plugin that allows users to view QuickTime (MOV), Windows Media, MP3, and Ogg files embedded in websites using Internet Explorer.

Applications that make use of libVLC

VLC can handle some incomplete files and can be used to preview files being downloaded in some cases. Several programs, including eMule and KCeasy, make use of this. VLC code is also used by the free/open-source Internet television application Miro. The open-source video encoder HandBrake is used to load libdvdcss from VLC Media Player. Easy Subtitles Synchronizer, a freeware Windows subtitle editing program, previews the video with the edited subtitles using VLC.