VideoLAN, VLC: an overview

VLC media player is a universal, open-source, cross-platform media playback and streaming application. This talk will give an overview of the VideoLAN project, the history behind VideoLAN and VLC, and will speak about the most used features and an insight in less well-known features making the live easier for both beginners and advanced users.

VLC media player supports MS Windows, OS/2, Solaris, GNU/Linux, BSD and Mac OS X on the desktop. Ports to Android, iOS and other mobile operating systems are under development. The application is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 and later, based upon a portable library licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

VLC media player is published by VideoLAN, a French non-profit organization, and is mostly developed by volunteers in their spare time. VideoLAN’s additional products include the well-known H.264 encoder x264, specialized media streaming applications and a diverse set of libraries to support DVD and BR playback on all major operating systems. A bit of history of the project will be explained.

VLC media player is known by most because of its universal playback features enabling playback of virtually all video and audio formats accessed as files, from optical media or through network streams without the need for supplemental codecs. Additionally, current versions include Service Discovery modules to detect input sources on the local network or the internet, a media library to organize commonly played files and extensions to add support for Twitter or automatic subtitle downloading. In this talk, we are also going to demonstrate video and audio filters as well as ways to synchronize the playback of video, audio and subtitle tracks.

Furthermore, a broad set of modules enables advanced use cases: streaming on the local network and the internet or media conversation to local files or outgoing streams using standardized formats. This enables VLC media player to act as a streaming server for QuickTime Player and Windows Media Player as well as Flash, HTTP Live Streams and set-top boxes receiving multicast streams. As part of this talk, we will show how to setup basic streams and provide an insight in more advanced setups.

In addition to the native graphical interfaces on major desktop operating systems, VLC media player includes specialized interfaces for remote access via HTTP and the terminal, which allow direct access to advanced options and maintenance on remote servers. Another common use-case are remote apps on smartphones to control VLC media player running on a PC.

Besides its well-known application for major desktop operating systems, VideoLAN publishes ports to mobile operating systems, namely Android and iOS this year. This talk will give a sneak-peak at the customized interfaces and their features.

Finally, we are going to demonstrate future features of VLC media player, which will be part of the forthcoming 2.1 (3.0?) release.