VLC media player is a portable, free and open-source, cross-platform media player and streaming
media server written by the VideoLAN project.
VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including
DVD-Video, video CD and streaming protocols.
It is able to stream media over computer networks and to transcode multimedia files.
The default distribution of VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding
libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins.
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 implementations.
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.
History The VideoLan project was originally started
as an academic project in 1996.
VLC used to stand for "VideoLAN Client" when VLC was a client of the VideoLAN project.
But since VLC is no longer merely a client, that initialism no longer applies.
It was intended to consist of a client and server to stream videos across a campus network.
Originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris, it is now developed by contributors
worldwide and is coordinated by VideoLAN, a non-profit organization.
Rewritten from scratch in 1998, it was released under GNU General Public License on 1 February
2001, with authorization from the headmaster of the École Centrale Paris.
The functionality of the server program, VideoLan Server, has mostly been subsumed into VLC
and has been deprecated.
The project name has been changed to VLC media player because there is no longer a client/server
infrastructure.
The cone icon used in VLC is a reference to the traffic cones collected by École Centrale's
Networking Students' Association.
The cone icon design was changed from a hand drawn low resolution icon to a higher resolution
CGI-rendered version in 2006, illustrated by Richard Øiestad.
After 13 years of development, version 1.0.0 of VLC media player was released on July 7,
2009.
Version 2.0.0 of VLC media player was released on February 18, 2012.
In 2011 and 2012, large parts of VLC were relicensed to the GNU Lesser General Public
License.
VLC is first in the sourceforge.net overall download count and has been downloaded more
than 1.3 billion times.
VLC is now available for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch on Apple's App Store.
It was present in the past, was pulled due to a licensing conflict between the GPL and
the iTunes Store agreement, but was then resubmitted under the Mozilla Public License.
Work began on VLC for Android in 2010 and a beta version for Android devices is now
available on the Google Play store.
A version for the Windows Store arrived on March 13, 2014.
Support for Windows RT, Windows Phone, and possibly the Xbox One are also in development.
Design principles Modular design
VLC, like most multimedia frameworks, has a very modular design which makes it easier
to include modules/plugins for new file formats, codecs, or streaming methods.
VLC 1.0.0 has more than 380 modules.
The VLC core creates its own graph of modules dynamically, depending on the situation: input
protocol, input file format, input codec, video card capabilities and other parameters.
In VLC, almost everything is a module, like interfaces, video and audio outputs, controls,
scalers, codecs, and audio/video filters.
Interfaces In VLC, interfaces are modules, which means
that VLC's core can launch one, many, or no interfaces.
The default GUI is based on Qt 4 for Windows and Linux, Cocoa for OS X, and Be API on BeOS;
but all give a similar standard interface.
The old default GUI was based on wxWidgets on Windows and GNU/Linux.
The interface contains an easter egg which changes the VLC traffic cone logo so that
it's wearing a Santa hat.
The logo changes on December 18, one week before Christmas, and reverts to its normal
appearance on January 1.
VLC supports highly customizable skins through the skins2 interface, also supporting Winamp
2 and XMMS skins.
The customizable skins feature can malfunction depending on which version is being used.
Skins are not supported in the Mac OS X implementation of VLC.
For console users, VLC has a remote control interface and an ncurses interface.
As VLC can act as a streaming server, rather than a media player, it can be useful to control
it from a remote location and there are interfaces allowing this.
The Remote Control Interface is a text-based interface for doing this.
There are also interfaces using telnet and HTTP.
Control In addition to these interfaces, it is possible
to control VLC in different ways: Configurable hotkeys
Mouse gestures LIRC and infrared controllers
D-Bus Remote control software for mobile operating
systems such as Android, Symbian and iOS Features
Because VLC is a packet-based media player it plays almost all video content.
It can play some, even if they're damaged, incomplete, or unfinished, such as files that
are still downloading via a peer-to-peer network.
It also plays m2t MPEG transport streams files while they are still being digitized from
an HDV camera via a FireWire cable, making it possible to monitor the video as it is
being played.
The player can also use libcdio to access .iso files so that users can play files on
a disk image, even if the user's operating system cannot work directly with .iso images.
VLC supports all audio and video formats supported by libavcodec and libavformat.
This means that VLC can play back H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 2 video as well as support FLV
or MXF file formats "out of the box" using FFmpeg's libraries.
Alternatively, VLC has modules for codecs that are not based on FFmpeg's libraries.
VLC is one of the free software DVD players that ignores DVD region coding on RPC-1 firmware
drives, making it a region-free player.
However, it does not do the same on RPC-2 firmware drives, as in these cases the 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.
VLC media player has some filters that can distort, rotate, split, deinterlace, and mirror
videos as well as create display walls or add a logo overlay.
It can also output video as ASCII art.
VLC media player can play high definition recordings of D-VHS tapes duplicated to a
computer using CapDVHS.exe.
This offers another way to archive all D-VHS tapes with the DRM copy freely tag.
Using a FireWire connection from cable boxes to computers, VLC can stream live, unencrypted
content to a monitor or HDTV.
VLC media player can display the playing video as the desktop wallpaper, like Windows DreamScene,
by using DirectX, only available on Windows operating systems.
VLC media player can create screencasts and record the desktop.
On Microsoft Windows, VLC also supports the Direct Media Object framework and can thus
make use of some third-party DLLs.
On most platforms, VLC can tune into and view DVB-C, DVB-T, and DVB-S channels.
On Mac OS X the separate EyeTV plugin is required, on Windows it requires the card's BDA Drivers.
VLC can be installed or run directly from a USB flash drive or other external drive.
VLC can be extended through scripting; it uses the Lua scripting language.
VLC can play videos in the AVCHD format, a highly compressed format used in recent HD
camcorders.
VLC can generate a number of music visualization displays.
The program is able to convert media files into various supported formats.
Operating system compatibility
VLC media player is a cross-platform media player, with versions for Windows, OS X, iOS,
Linux, Android, BSD, BeOS, OS/2, Solaris, Syllable and QNX.
However, forward and backward compatibility between versions of VLC media player and different
versions of OS are not maintained over more than a couple or so generations.
64-bit builds are available, and an experimental version is available for 64-bit Windows.
Windows 8 support The VLC port for Windows 8 is backed by a
Kickstarter campaign to add support for a new GUI based on Microsoft's Metro design
language that will run on the Windows Runtime.
It brings support for DVDs, VCDs and unencrypted Blu-ray Discs, none of which are supported
natively in Windows 8.
All the existing features including video filters, subtitle support and an equalizer
will be present in Windows 8.
A beta version of VLC for Windows 8 was released to the Microsoft Store on March 13, 2014.
Android support In May 2012, the VLC team stated that a version
of VLC for Android was being developed.
A beta version has been made available on Google Play.
Use of VLC with other programs API
Several APIs can connect to VLC and use its functionality:
libVLC API – the VLC Core, for C and C++ VLCKit – an Objective-C framework for Mac
OS X JavaScript API – the evolution of ActiveX
API and Firefox integration D-Bus controls
Go binding C# interface
Python controls Java API
DirectShow filters Delphi/Pascal API: PasLibVlc by: "Robert Jędrzejczyk"
Free Pascal bindings and an OOP wrapper component, via the libvlc.pp and vlc.pp units.
This comes standard with the Free Pascal Compiler as of 2012-11-06.
The Phonon multimedia API for Qt and KDE applications can optionally use VLC as a backend.
Browser plugins On Windows, Linux, OS X, and some other Unix-like
platforms, VLC provides an NPAPI plugin, which enables users to view QuickTime, Windows Media,
MP3, and Ogg files embedded in websites without using additional products.
It supports many 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 build the Google Video Player web browser plugin before switching
to use Adobe Flash.
Starting with version 0.8.2, VLC also provides an ActiveX plugin, which lets people view
QuickTime, Windows Media, MP3, and Ogg files embedded in websites when using Internet Explorer.
Applications that use the VLC plugin VLC can handle some incomplete files and in
some cases can be used to preview files being downloaded.
Several programs make use of this, including eMule and KCeasy.
The free/open-source Internet television application Miro also uses VLC code.
HandBrake, an open-source video encoder, loads libdvdcss from VLC Media Player.
Format support Input formats
VLC can read several formats, depending on the operating system VLC is running on, including:
Container formats 3GP, ASF, AVI, DVR-MS, FLV, Matroska, MIDI,
QuickTime File Format, MP4, Ogg, OGM, WAV, MPEG-2, AIFF, Raw audio, Raw DV, MXF, VOB,
RM, DVD-Video, VCD, SVCD, CD Audio, DVB Video formats
Cinepak, Dirac, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, H.265/MPEG HEVC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3, MJPEG,
MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo 3&4, Sorenson, Theora, VC-1, VP5, VP6, VP8, VP9,
DNxHD, Prores and some WMV.
Audio formats AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, DTS, DV Audio, XM, FLAC,
It, MACE, Mod, Monkey's Audio, MP3, Opus, PLS, QCP, QDM2/QDMC, RealAudio, Speex, Screamtracker
3/S3M, TTA, Vorbis, WavPack, WMA.
Subtitles DVD-Video, SVCD, DVB, OGM, SubStation Alpha,
SubRip, Advanced SubStation Alpha, MPEG-4 Timed Text, Text file, VobSub, MPL2, Teletext.
Network protocols UDP, RTP, HTTP, FTP, MMS, RTSP, RTMP, RSS/Atom
Capture devices Video4Linux, DirectShow, Desktop, Digital
TV Output formats
VLC can transcode or stream audio and video into several formats depending on the operating
system, including: Container formats
ASF, AVI, FLV, Fraps, MP4, Ogg, WAV, MPEG-2, MPJPEG, FLAC, QuickTime File Format, Matroska,
WebM Video formats
H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, VP5, VP6, VP8, VP9, Theora,
DV, Dirac Audio formats
AAC, AC-3, DV Audio, FLAC, MP3, Speex, Vorbis Streaming protocols
UDP, HTTP, RTP, RTSP, MMS Legality
The VLC media player software installers for the Mac OS X platform and the Windows platform
include the libdvdcss DVD decryption library, even though this library may be legally restricted
in certain jurisdictions.
USA The VLC media player software is able to read
video and audio data from DVDs that incorporate Content Scramble System encryption, even though
the VLC media player software lacks a CSS decryption license.
The unauthorized decryption of CSS-encrypted DVD content or unauthorized distribution of
CSS decryption tools may violate the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act,.
Decryption of CSS-encrypted DVD content has been temporarily authorized for certain purposes
under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act anticircumvention exemptions that were issued
by the US Copyright Office in 2010.
However these exemptions do not change the DMCA's ban on the distribution of CSS decryption
tools like VLC.
See also
Comparison of video player software List of codecs
Notes and references
External links Official website
VLC for Android Beta at the Google Play store VLC Android package at the F-Droid repository