VLC is a libre and open source media player and multimedia engine, focused on playing everything, and running everywhere.
VLC can play most multimedia files, discs, streams, devices and is able to convert, encode, stream and manipulate streams into numerous formats.
VLC is used by many over the world, on numerous platforms, for very different use cases.
The engine of VLC can be embedded by 3rd party applications, and is called libVLC.
VLC is part of the VideoLAN project and is developed and supported by a community of volunteers.
The VideoLAN project was started at the university École Centrale Paris who relicensed VLC under the GPLv2 license in February 2001. Since then, VLC has been downloaded multi-billion times.
VLC is released under the GPLv2 (or later) license. On some platforms, it is de facto GPLv3, because of dependencies licenses.
libVLC, the engine is released under the LGPLv2 (or later) license.
This allows embedding the engine in 3rd party applications, while letting them to be licensed under other licenses.
VLC is available on the following platforms:
- Windows (from 7 to all versions of 10), including UWP platforms
- macOS (10.10 and more recent)
- GNU/Linux and affiliated
- *BSD and affiliated
- Android (4.2 and more recent), including Android TV and Android Auto
- iOS (9 and more recent), including AppleTV and iPadOS
- Haiku, OS/2 and a few others.
Not all platforms receive the same amount of care, due to our limited resources.
Nota Bene: Android repository and iOS repository are on different repository than the main one.
VLC is maintained by a community of people, and VideoLAN is not paying any of them.
The community is composed of developers, helpers, maintainers, designers and writers that want
the open source project to thrive.
The main development of VLC is done in the C language, but this repository has also plenty of C++, Obj-C, asm, Rust.
Other repositories linked to vlc are done in Kotlin/Java (Android), in Swift (iOS), C# (libVLCSharp)
We need help for the following tasks:
- coding
- packaging for Windows, macOS and Linux distributions
- technical writing for the documentation
- design
- support
- community management and communication.
Please reach us :)
We are on IRC, on the #videolan channel on Freenode.
Contributions are now done through Merge Requests on our gitlab repository.
CI, Discussions should be resolved before merging a Merge Request.
libVLC is an embeddable engine for 3rd party applications and frameworks.
It runs on the same platforms of VLC (and sometimes on more platforms) and can provide playback, streaming and converting of multimedia files and stream.
libVLC has numerous bindings for other languagues, like C++, Python or C#.
You can found here several links that might help you:
- The VLC web site
- Support
- Forums
- Wiki
- The Developers site
- VLC hacking guide
- Bugtracker
- The VideoLAN web site
ABOUT-NLS - Notes on the Free Translation Project.
AUTHORS - VLC authors.
COPYING - The GPL license.
COPYING.LIB - The LGPL license.
INSTALL - Installation and building instructions.
NEWS - Important modifications between the releases.
README - This file.
THANKS - VLC contributors.
bin/ - VLC binaries.
bindings/ - libVLC bindings to other languages.
compat/ - compatibility library for operating systems missing
essential functionalities.
contrib/ - Facilities for retrieving external libraries and building
them for systems that don't have the right versions.
doc/ - Miscellaneous documentation.
extras/analyser - Code analyser and editor specific files.
extras/buildsystem - different buildsystems specific files.
extras/misc - Files that don't fit in the other extras/ categories.
extras/package - VLC packaging specific files such as spec files.
extras/tools/ - Facilities for retrieving external building tools needed
for systems that don't have the right versions.
include/ - Header files.
lib/ - libVLC source code.
modules/ - VLC plugins and modules. Most of the code is here.
po/ - VLC translations.
share/ - Common Resources files.
src/ - libvlccore source code.
test/ - testing system.