VideoLAN is a complete software solution for video streaming and playback, developed by students of the Ecole Centrale Paris and developers from all over the world, under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

VideoLAN was originally designed to stream MPEG videos on high bandwidth networks, but VideoLAN's main software, VLC media player, has evolved to become a full-featured, cross-platform media player.

More details about the project can be found on the VideoLAN Web site.

VLC media player

Originally called VideoLAN Client, VLC media player is VideoLAN's main software.

VLC works on many platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Solaris, Familiar Linux, Yopy/Linupy and QNX.

It can play:

• MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files from a hard disk, a CD-ROM drive, and so on
• DVDs, VCDs, and Audio CDs
• From satellite cards (DVB-S)
• Several types of network streams: UDP/RTP Unicast, UDP/RTP Multicast, HTTP, RTSP, MMS, etc.
• From acquisition or encoding cards (on GNU/Linux and Windows only)

VLC can also be used as a streaming server. These aspects are detailed in the Streaming HowTo.