VideoLAN
VideoLAN is a project of the French engineering school École Centrale Paris from Châtenay-Malabry near Paris . In collaboration with independent developers from over 20 countries and former students of the school, VideoLAN is developing an open source streaming solution for digital audio and video formats , and encoders , decoders and other auxiliary programs for various digital audio and video formats are also developed. The project has over 50 members, around 15 to 20 of whom work regularly. The best known and most popular product of the project is the VLC media player .
All works are open source , which means they can be viewed, passed on, used and changed by anyone. Most of the project is published under the GNU General Public License , but individual projects such as the AV1 decoder dav1d are under the copyleft-free BSD license .
System support
Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Windows , macOS and Linux systems are supported.
Sub-projects
VideoLAN consists of several sub-projects:
- the universal VLC media player for playing back various audio / video files, DVDs, VCDs and streams from a network, which was originally developed only for playing back streams. In the meantime, numerous properties of the in-house VideoLAN server have been adopted,
- the VideoLAN server for streaming DVDs, a limited number of audio / video formats and digital TV signals. It has not been continuously developed since about summer 2003, because the VLC media player has taken over most of the capabilities, runs on more operating systems and is much easier to use,
- many smaller libraries like libdvdcss to decrypt the CSS - copy protection of DVDs , libdca (formerly libdts) to play audio tracks in DTS format and x264 to encode video tracks in MPEG format H.264 ,
- the VLMC VideoLAN Movie Creator , a semi-professional video editing software , which was previously published in version 0.2.0 as a Windows version. It is designed as platform-independent software and is currently available as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X versions.
The streaming solution
The original streaming solution consists of the VideoLAN server and the VLC media player . Thus was the streaming of digital TV -Inhalten, DVDs and MPEG & - DivX -Filmdateien on the campus of the Ecole Centrale Paris possible. In the meantime, both programs have been expanded so that streaming over the Internet can also be implemented. A large number of protocols are supported, such as UDP , RTP , HTTP , MMS etc. Both IPv4 and IPv6 address ranges are available, as well as the two different streaming options unicast and multicast . VLC now also supports video-on-demand , so that it can compete with streaming solutions from commercial providers. It is currently used commercially by several companies, for example the French ISP Free or the Dutch streaming company First Mile TV .
The concept of the solution has been softened since January 2003 through the further development of the VLC media player into its own streaming server . An indirect consequence of this is that the solution can also be used by users without much previous knowledge, since the VLC media player, in contrast to the VideoLAN server, has a graphical user interface .
additional
According to its own statement, the VideoLAN project operates one of the best end-user support services in the open source media player scene . This is due to the fact that users receive qualified answers to their questions from the core developers and other active members within 24 hours. Depending on the urgency and type of question, users can choose between four different ways of making contact.
The various projects in the open source software scene for the creation of media players such as xine , MPlayer and VideoLAN are mostly in amicable competition. The same program libraries such as FFmpeg are often used for similar purposes.
The Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen , known for bypassing the playback protection CSS on DVDs and the FairPlay DRM system used in the iTunes Music Store , is a member of the VideoLAN team.
