VideoLAN's Piece de Resistance

By the time the first large-scale tests began in November 1999, the VideoLAN solution supported three OSes: BeOS, Max OS, and Solaris, although VLC could only import network streams. DVD support was added in 2000. "But the real opening of this project occurred in 2001," Cellerier says, "when the director of Ecole Centrale Paris decided to place all VideoLAN software under the GNU General Public License. From that date on, contributors from all around the world started working on the project." This influx of developers has resulted in new functionalities being added to VLC on almost a daily basis, according to Cellerier.

VideoLAN’s decision to release their code to developers paid dividends almost immediately. "Gildas Bazin ported VLC to Windows within weeks after our open-source Linux-only release. That was unexpected, so soon," says Sam Hocevar, a core VideoLAN developer since 1998, in an early January interview with Builder.com, who bestowed upon VideoLAN one of its 2004 Open Source Awards. The number of developers working on VLC fluctuates month to month, but Cellerier says that "about 40 persons have contributed significantly to VLC. These persons come from nine countries," he says. "About ten developers are currently active, and several contributors work on VLC as a part of their jobs."

It Slices, It Dices, It Demuxes
While VideoLAN originally sought to create separate client and server software, that isn’t the case any more. "VLC was first designed to be the client part of the VideoLAN architecture," says Cellerier. "But since VLS didn’t have VLC’s complex access/demux architecture—it could only remux MPEG PS to TS and stream MPEG TS—implementing streaming in VLC was seen as the right alternative to adding loads of code to VLS." In fact, work on the development of VLS had been stopped for over a year now as VideoLAN moves to a VLC-only architecture. "VLC’s streaming abilities are now more complete than VLS’s," he says.

VLC is compatible with a wide range of input and output formats:
Inputs—File, HTTP/FTP, UDP (multicast and unicast), DVB (satellite)
Input Formats—MPEG, AVI, ASF
Video Codecs—MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, H.264, Theora, WMV
Audio Codes—MPEG-1 Layer 1 and 2, MP3, AC3, Vorbis
Outputs—local, UDP (multicast and unicast), RTP, HTTP, MMSH

(For a full grid of VLC’s features, visit here. For a full list of VLC’s streaming capabilities, see here.)

VLC has already withstood the test of real-world use a few times over. "We use [VLC] on the École Centrale campus to stream about 100 TV and radio channels at 300Mbps to about 1,200 computers using multicast," says Cellerier. "French ADSL ISP Free uses VLC on the server of their TV broadcasting service." VLC also has received praise for its use as a desktop media player: "Simply put: this tiny application opens every kind of A/V file when other players can’t," raves one reviewer on www.versiontracker.com. "It’s better than QuickTime and Windows Media Player and Real simply because of its unfaltering versatility."

"VLC is very easy to set up," claims Cellerier. "All simple tasks such as broadcasting video on a network have been integrated in the graphical user interface." More advanced features require command-line instructions, but VideoLAN is working hard towards lowering the know-how necessary to stream via VLC. "We are about to release a whole new documentation concerning VLC’s streaming abilities that will make it even easier to use," explains Cellerier. "I’d say that as long as you know what you want to achieve, doing it with VLC shouldn’t be too hard."

New features for VLC are being worked on all the time. Most notable among those currently under development are full Video-on-Demand RTSP support, SSL content encryption/decryption, and an on-screen display interface. "All VLC development is focused on making it the best media player and server available," says Cellerier. "Maybe one day we’ll achieve the number one item on our to do list: world domination."