Feb 02, 2021 12:30:00

20th anniversary of open source of free and ultra-high performance media player 'VLC' development project 'VideoLAN'

The non-profit organization '

VideoLAN ', which develops the open source multimedia player ' VLC ', celebrated its 20th anniversary on February 1, 2021 as an open source project. VideoLAN says it plans to host an event celebrating its 20th anniversary from late 2021.

Press Release --VideoLAN is 20 years old! --VideoLAN
https://www.videolan.org/press/videolan-20.html

VLC, a completely free and ad-free multimedia player, can run on multiple platforms such as Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS, and is an application that supports many media codecs and formats. In 2012, it recorded 1 billion downloads and more than 3.5 billion downloads at the time of writing the article, and has received overwhelming support.

VideoLAN, which develops VLC, is a project launched in 1996 by students from Ecole Central Paris , the pinnacle of French science, engineering and technology education institutions. By the way, VLC is an abbreviation for 'VideoLAN Client'.

The king of media player 'VLC' was born from a small student project --GIGAZINE

For the vast majority of PC users at the time, the media player was Microsoft's Windows Media Player, which came standard with Windows . However, Windows Media Player did not support many file formats, so some files could not be opened.

VLC that appeared in such a situation is completely free and has a large number of built-in codecs, and since it was compatible with various file formats without introducing a separate codec, it quickly became available all over the world. It has become a popular media player. VLC version 1.0 was released in July 2009.

'VLC media player', a multimedia player that can play both DivX and DVD without the need for a special codec --GIGAZINE

Initially, VideoLAN was a project under the university curriculum, but with the great success of VLC, it turned into an independent software development project run by a non-profit organization. With the agreement of Ecole Central Paris on February 1, 2001, VideoLAN became the operating body of open source projects, and VideoLAN projects including VLC and decoding libraries such as libdca , liba52 and libmpeg2 are also under the GPL license. It came to be placed.

Up to the time of writing the article, VideoLAN has involved about 1000 volunteers. The number of VLCs , encoders, and libraries is increasing, and in recent years, the AV1 decoder dav1d has also been developed.

VLC Player developer announces new AV1 decoder 'dav1d' with higher performance and royalty-free than HEVC --GIGAZINE

According to VideoLAN, an event commemorating the 20th anniversary is planned both online and offline. However, due to the pandemic of the new coronavirus, the event will be postponed until the latter half of 2021.