The World’s Most Popular Media Player Turns 15

VLC, the world’s most popular (and lauded) media player, is now fifteen years old, its creator VideoLAN has announced. While the genesis of VLC predates its Birthday of 1st February, 2001 – the software began life as Network 2000 five years previously – the date marks the point at which VLC was granted its GPL license.

“If you’ve been to one of my talks, (if you haven’t, you should come to one), you know that the project that became VideoLAN and VLC, is almost 5 years older than that, and was called Network 2000,” Jean-Baptiste Kempf, President of VideoLAN, said in a blog post. “Moreover, the first commit on the VideoLAN Client project is from August 8th 1999, by Michel Kaempf had 21275 lines of code already, so the VLC software was started earlier in 1999. However, the most important date for the birth of VLC is when it was allowed to be used outside of the school, and therefore when the project was GPL-ized: February 1st, 2001.”

VLC is now available for Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux, iOS, Windows RT, Android, Android TV, Apple TV, Solaris, BSD, OS/2, Tizen, and Chrome OS, while the team is hard at work developing VLC 3.0, which will introduce improved GPU decoding, adaptive streaming, and Chromecast integration.

Image courtesy of VideoLAN.