VLC media player (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG, DivX, Ogg, and many more) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. However in recent years it has also become a extremely powerful server to stream live and on demand video in several formats to our network and the Internet.It started as a student project at the French École Centrale, Paris but is now a worldwide project with developers from 20 countries. (more).

VLC is built in a modular way. This means that you can choose from a range of different modules to decide how to control VLC and how to display the video output.

A unique feature of VLC is that it has all the major codecs built in, so you do not need to install additional codecs to your operating system (Windows, Linux..) in order to get playback support.

Author: VideoLAN
License: Open source