Tuesday, February 2, 2016

15 Years of VLC and VideoLAN

Jean-Baptiste Kempf (comments):

Since then, only on VLC, we've had around,

  • 700 contributors,
  • 70000 commits,
  • at least 2 billion downloads,
  • hundreds of millions users!

And all that, mostly with volunteers and without turning into a business!

gregschlom:

A little know fact about the VideoLAN project is that it was started so that the student organization could justify the need to replace the old networking infrastructure of the campus with a brand new high-bandwidth fiber optics network. They really wanted to deploy a fiber optic network but the school would have never approved it so they thought “OK, we need something that uses a ton of bandwidth, let’s make a video streaming app”.

They proceeded to start the VideoLAN project, with the VideoLAN Client (VLC) and VideoLAN server, and streamed movies and public television channels to the whole campus.

It remains frustrating to me that VLC can play (just about) everything but only in its own app, while QuickTime works in every app but doesn’t support many popular formats. For a while, QuickTime plug-ins seemed to be the solution, but Apple doesn’t want to support them anymore.

Previously: Perian to Cease Development.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

So, how do these conditions affect your file management system related to the OS directory and to your EF libraries?

@Sydney Not at all. It’s just frustrating that some files can’t play within EagleFiler. I have to double-click to open them in another app.

Leave a Comment