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VLC media player

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VLC media player
Developer(s)VideoLAN Project
Stable release
Windows, Linux, & macOS3.0.21[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 5 June 2024; 39 days ago (5 June 2024)
Android3.5.4[2] Edit this on Wikidata / 6 July 2023; 12 months ago (6 July 2023)
ChromeOS1.7.3[3] Edit this on Wikidata / 23 December 2015; 8 years ago (23 December 2015)
iOS, Apple TV3.5.7[4] Edit this on Wikidata / 18 March 2024; 3 months ago (18 March 2024)
Windows (UWP)3.1.2 / 20 July 2018; 5 years ago (2018-07-20)[5][6]
Windows Phone3.1.2 / 20 July 2018; 5 years ago (2018-07-20)[7]
Repository
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeMedia player
LicenseGNU General Public License
Websitevideolan.org

VLC media player is a free software media player by the VideoLAN project.

It is a highly portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. VLC used to stand for "VideoLan Client", but that meaning is deprecated.[8] [9]

It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Windows CE, Linux, and Solaris, and is widely used with over 40 million downloads for version 0.8.6.[10]

VLC uses a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries. Many of its codecs are provided by the libavcodec codec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses mainly its own muxer and demuxers. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library.

Version 0.8.6, which adds support for WMV version 9 and enhances support for H.264, was released on 10 December 2006.[11]

History

VLC was initially the client for the VideoLAN project, which aimed to create a program to stream videos across a network. It was originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris, and was released under the GPL license on the 1 February 2001. It is now developed by contributors worldwide.

VLC was the client application for VideoLAN, with VLC standing for "VideoLAN Client". The project also created a server program, VideoLAN Server (VLS), whose functionality has mostly been subsumed into VLC. The VideoLAN Server has since been deprecated. The VLC name has therefore changed to "VLC media player", since there is no longer a client/server infrastructure.

The cone icon is a reference to the traffic cones collected by Ecole Centrale's Networking Students' Association.[12] The cone icon design was changed from a hand drawn low resolution icon[13] to a higher resolution CGI rendered version in 2006.[14]

Design principles

File:VLCgnome.png
VLC with the GTK+ GNOME interface
VLC with the wxWidgets interface, running on KDE
File:VLC Vista.png
Template:Puic
VLC with the ncurses interface, running on Mac OS X

VLC has a very modular design, which makes it easier to include modules for new file formats, codecs or streaming methods. This principle also stretches to other areas, and there is a wide selection of interface, video and audio outputs, controls and audio and video filter modules. There are more than 300 modules in VLC.[15]

Interfaces

The standard GUI is based on wxWidgets for Windows/Linux, Cocoa for Mac OS X, and Be API on BeOS; but all give a similar standard interface. A Qt 4 interface is also in the works for Linux and Windows.[16]

VLC also supports highly personalizable skins through the skins2 interface, Winamp 2 and XMMS skins.

For console fans, VLC has 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 special interfaces allowing this. The Remote Control Interface is a text-based interface for doing this; and there are also interfaces using telnet and HTTP (AJAX).

Control

In addition to these interfaces, it is possible to control VLC in different ways:

Features

  • VLC is popular for its ability to play the video content of incomplete, unfinished, or damaged video downloads before the files have been fully downloaded. (For example, files still downloading via BitTorrent or eMule) This is because it is a packet-based player.
  • The player also has the ability to use libcdio to access .iso files so that the user can play files on a disk image, even if the user's operating system does not have the capability of working directly with .iso images.
  • VLC supports all codecs and all file formats supported by FFmpeg. This means that DVD Video and MPEG-4 playback as well as support for Ogg and Matroska (MKV) file formats works "out of the box". However, this feature is not unique to VLC, as any player, including MPlayer and xine, using the FFmpeg libraries can play those formats without need for external codecs. VLC does, however, also support codecs that are not included in FFmpeg.
  • VLC media player has some filters that can distort, rotate, split, deinterlace, mirror videos, create display walls, or add a logo overlay. It can also produce video output 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. An entire library of tapes (or about 50 D-VHS 2 hours long) can be placed on a single terabyte sized hard drive. However, they must be imported by playing the tapes in real time, and can't simply be copied as data files.
  • 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.
  • On Microsoft Windows, VLC also supports the Direct Media Object (DMO) framework and can therefore make use of some third-party DLLs.

Use of VLC with other programs

API

There are several APIs to connect to and use VLC functionalities:

  • libVLC API, which is the VLC Core, for C, C++ and C#
  • JavaScript API, which is the evolution of ActiveX API and Firefox integration;
  • D-Bus Controls;
  • C# interface;
  • Python controls;
  • Java API.

Browser plugins

  • On Windows, Linux, and some other platforms, VLC provides a NPAPI plugin,[17] which lets people view some QuickTime and Windows Media files embedded in websites without using Microsoft or Apple products. It supports Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite, Safari and Opera as well. This plugin was initially used by Google to build the Google Video web browser plugin,[18] which currently uses Adobe Flash.
  • Starting with version 0.8.2, VLC also provides an ActiveX plugin, which lets people view some QuickTime (MOV) and Windows Media files embedded in websites when using Internet Explorer.
  • It should be noted that these plugins have less features than default plugin. For example, the entire video must load prior to playback and no graphic controls are present as in Windows Media Player Plugin.

Applications which use the VLC plugin

  • VLC is good at handling incomplete files and so can be used to preview files being downloaded; several programs make use of this, including eMule and KCeasy.
  • The free/open-source Miro Media Player (formerly Democracy Player) also uses VLC code.
  • The Songbird media browser joins code from VLC and Firefox.

A few other applications use VLC for playback: We use VideoLAN. A portable version is packaged by PortableApps.com and is available from the VLC Portable page on their site.

Supported formats

Readable formats

VLC can read several formats, depending on the operating system VLC is running on.[19]

Input
UDP/RTP unicast or multicast, HTTP, FTP, MMS, DVDs, VCD, SVCD, CD Audio, DVB (only on Linux and on Windows in development versions), Video acquisition (via V4l and DirectShow), RSS/Atom Feeds, and from files stored on your computer.
Container formats
3GP,[20] ASF, AVI, FLV, MKV, QuickTime, MP4, Ogg, OGM, WAV, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), AIFF, Raw audio, Raw DV, FLAC. MXF.
Video formats
Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3,[21] MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, Sorenson (thus enabling direct playback of the modified Sorenson H.263 encoded videos downloaded from YouTube), Theora, VC-1,Cite error: The <ref> tag name cannot be a simple integer (see the help page). VP5,Cite error: The <ref> tag name cannot be a simple integer (see the help page). VP6,Cite error: The <ref> tag name cannot be a simple integer (see the help page). WMV.
Subtitles
DVD, SVCD, DVB, OGM, SubStation Alpha,[22] SubRip, Advanced SubStation Alpha,[22] MPEG-4 Timed Text, Text file, Vobsub, MPL2,Cite error: The <ref> tag name cannot be a simple integer (see the help page). Teletext.Cite error: The <ref> tag name cannot be a simple integer (see the help page).
Audio formats
AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR,[20] DTS, DV Audio, FLAC, MACE, MP3, QDM2/QDMC, RealAudio,[23] Speex, Screamtracker 3/S3M, TTA, Vorbis, WavPack,[24] WMA.

Output formats for streaming/encoding

VLC can transcode into several formats depending on the operating system.

Container formats
ASF, AVI, FLV,Cite error: The <ref> tag name cannot be a simple integer (see the help page). MP4, Ogg, Wav, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), MPJPEG, FLAC, MOV
Video formats
H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, VP5,Cite error: The <ref> tag name cannot be a simple integer (see the help page). VP6,Cite error: The <ref> tag name cannot be a simple integer (see the help page). Theora, DV
Audio formats
AAC, AC3, DV Audio, FLAC, MP3,[25] Speex, Vorbis
Streaming protocols
UDP, HTTP, RTP, RTSP, MMS, File

Unsupported Output Formats

VLC is currently (as of 0.8.6c) unable to play videos using the following codecs:

See also

References

  1. ^ "3.0.21". 5 June 2024. Retrieved 6 June 2024.
  2. ^ "3.5.4". 6 July 2023. Retrieved 31 October 2023.
  3. ^ "VLC - Chrome Web Store". 23 December 2015. Retrieved 4 April 2022.
  4. ^ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vlc-media-player/id650377962. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  5. ^ "Official Download of VLC media player for Windows Store - VideoLAN". www.videolan.org. VideoLAN. 20 July 2018. Retrieved 7 August 2018.
  6. ^ "Get VLC - Microsoft Store". www.microsoft.com. VideoLAN. 20 July 2018. Retrieved 7 August 2018.
  7. ^ "Official Download of VLC media player for Windows Phone - VideoLAN". www.videolan.org. VideoLAN. 20 July 2018. Retrieved 7 August 2018.
  8. ^ Jean-Baptiste Kempf (November 23, 2006). "VLC Name". Yet another blog for JBKempf. Retrieved 2007-02-24.
  9. ^ VideoLAN Team. "Intellectual Properties". VideoLAN Wiki. Retrieved 2007-07-30.
  10. ^ "Download Statistics". VideoLAN Project. Retrieved 2007-10-21.
  11. ^ Derk-Jan Hartman (10 December, 2006). "Release notification, 0.8.6". videolan-announce mailing list. Retrieved 2007-02-24. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  12. ^ Jon Lech Johansen (June 23, 2005). "VLC cone". So sue me: Jon Lech Johansen’s blog. Retrieved 2007-02-24.
  13. ^ "vlc48x48.png" (PNG). VideoLAN Project. Retrieved 2007-02-24.
  14. ^ "vlc128x128.png" (PNG). VideoLAN Project. Retrieved 2007-02-24.
  15. ^ "VLC media player List of modules". VLC media player trac system.
  16. ^ Jean-Baptiste Kempf (February 10, 2007). "Qt4 Interface". Yet another blog for JBKempf. Retrieved 2007-03-07.
  17. ^ http://www.videolan.org/doc/play-howto/en/ch04.html#id293992
  18. ^ http://code.google.com/patches.html
  19. ^ "VLC features list". VideoLAN Project. Retrieved 2007-02-24.
  20. ^ a b To use AMR as audio codec, VLC and FFmpeg need to be compiled with AMR support. This is because the AMR license is not compatible with the VLC license.
  21. ^ Indeo 4 and 5 codecs are not supported
  22. ^ a b The current version only supports some of the formatting data from SSA/ASS (only coloring but no positioning, animation, typesetting etc.), but it was announced that it will be improved in 0.9.0.
  23. ^ Real Audio playback is provided through the FFmpeg library which only supports the Cook (RealAudio G2 / RealAudio 8) decoder at the moment.
  24. ^ Currently only supported when encapsulated in the Matroska container format, and includes no multichannel support.
  25. ^ You need to compile VLC with mp3lame support

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to VLC.
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