VLC Media Player

VLC Media Player

VLC media player (informally just VLC) is a highly portable free and open-source cross-platform media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project.

VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-Video, video CD and streaming protocols. It is able to stream over computer network and to transcode multimedia files.

The default distribution of VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins. Many of VLC's codecs are provided by the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses mainly its own muxer and demuxers and its own protocols. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux and OS X by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library.

History

The VideoLan project was originally started as an academic project in 1996. VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but since VLC is no longer simply a client, that initialism no longer applies.[8][9] It was intended to consist of a client and server to stream videos across a campus network. VLC was the client for the VideoLAN project. Originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris, it is now developed by contributors worldwide and is coordinated by the VideoLAN non-profit organization.

Rewritten from scratch in 1998, it was released under the GPL on 1 February 2001, with authorization from the headmaster of the École Centrale Paris. The functionality of the server program, VideoLan Server (VLS), has mostly been subsumed into VLC and has been deprecated.The project name has been changed to VLC media player because there is no longer a client/server infrastructure.

The cone icon used in VLC is a reference to the traffic cones collected by Ecole Centrale's Networking Students' Association.The cone icon design was changed from a hand drawn low resolution icon to a higher resolution CGI-rendered version in 2006, illustrated by Richard Øiestad.

After 13 years of development, version 1.0.0 of VLC media player was released on July 7, 2009.Version 2.0.0 of VLC media player was released on February 18, 2012.VLC is first in the sourceforge.net overall download count and has been downloaded more than 1 billion times.

VLC was once available for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch on Apple's App Store, but was pulled due to a licensing conflict between the GPL and the iTunes Store agreement.In 2011 and 2012, large parts of VLC were relicensed to the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Design principles

Modular design

VLC, like most multimedia frameworks, has a very modular design which makes it easier to include modules/plugins for new file formats, codecs, or streaming methods. VLC 1.0.0 has more than 380 modules.

The VLC core creates its own graph of modules dynamically, depending on the situation: input protocol, input file format, input codec, video card capabilities and other parameters. In VLC, almost everything is a module, like interfaces, video and audio outputs, controls, scalers, codecs, and audio/video filters.

Interfaces

In VLC, interfaces are modules, which means that VLC's core can launch one, many, or no interfaces.

The default GUI is based on Qt 4 for Windows and Linux, Cocoa for Mac OS X, and Be API on BeOS; but all give a similar standard interface. The old default GUI was based on wxWidgets on Windows and Linux.

The interface contains an easter egg which changes the VLC traffic cone logo so that it's wearing a Santa hat. The logo changes on December 18, one week before Christmas, and reverts to its normal appearance on January 1.

VLC supports highly customizable skins through the skins2 interface, also supporting Winamp 2 and XMMS skins. The customizable skins feature can malfunction depending on which version is being used.

For console users, VLC has a remote control interface and an ncurses interface. As VLC can act as a streaming server, rather than a media player, it can be useful to control it from a remote location and there are interfaces allowing this. The Remote Control Interface is a text-based interface for doing this. There are also interfaces using telnet and HTTP (Ajax).

Control

In addition to these interfaces, it is possible to control VLC in different ways:

1.Configurable hotkeys
2.Mouse gestures
3.LIRC and infrared controllers
4.D-Bus
5.Laptop motion
6.Remote control software for mobile operating systems such as Android, Symbian and iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch)

Features

Because VLC is a packet-based media player, it can play the video content of some damaged, incomplete, or unfinished videos (for example, files still downloading via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks). It also plays m2t MPEG transport streams (.TS) files while they are still being digitized from an HDV camera via a FireWire cable, making it possible to monitor the video as it is being played. The player can also use libcdio to access .iso files so that users can play files on a disk image, even if the user's operating system cannot work directly with .iso images.

VLC supports all audio and video formats supported by libavcodec and libavformat. This means that VLC can play back H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 2 video as well as support FLV or MXF file formats "out of the box" using FFmpeg's libraries. Alternatively, VLC has modules for codecs that are not based on FFmpeg's libraries. VLC is one of the free software DVD players that ignores DVD region coding on RPC-1 firmware drives, making it a region-free player. However, it does not do the same on RPC-2 firmware drives, as in these cases the region coding is enforced by the drive itself. VLC media player has some filters that can distort, rotate, split, deinterlace, and mirror videos as well as create display walls or add a logo overlay. It can also output video as ASCII art.

VLC media player can play high definition recordings of D-VHS tapes duplicated to a computer using CapDVHS.exe. This offers another way to archive all D-VHS tapes with the DRM copy freely tag. Using a FireWire connection from cable boxes to computers, VLC can stream live, unencrypted content to a monitor or HDTV. VLC media player can display the playing video as the desktop wallpaper, like Windows DreamScene, by using DirectX, only available on Windows operating systems. VLC media player can create screencasts and record the desktop. On Microsoft Windows, VLC also supports the Direct Media Object (DMO) framework and can thus make use of some third-party DLLs. On most platforms, VLC can tune into and view DVB-C, DVB-T, and DVB-S channels. On Mac OS X the separate EyeTV plugin is required, on Windows it requires the card's BDA Drivers.

VLC can be installed or run directly from a USB flash drive or other external drive. VLC can be extended through scripting. It uses the Lua scripting language.VLC can play videos in the AVCHD format, a highly compressed format used in recent HD camcorders. VLC can generate a number of music visualization displays. The program is able to convert media files into various supported formats.

Operating system compatibility

VLC media player is a cross-platform media player, with versions for Windows, OS X, iOS, Linux, Android, BSD, BeOS, OS/2, Solaris, Syllable and QNX. However, forward and backward compatibility between versions of VLC media player and different versions of OS are not maintained over more than a couple or so generations.

Windows 8 support

The VLC port for Windows 8 is backed by a Kickstarter campaign to add support for a new GUI based on Microsoft's Metro design language, it could bring support for DVDs, VCDs and unencrypted Blu-ray Discs which are not supported in Windows 8. All the existing features including video filters, subtitle support and an equalizer will be present in Windows 8.

Android support

In May 2012, the VLC team stated that a version of VLC for Android was being developed.A beta version has been made available on Google Play.

Use of VLC with other programs

API

Several APIs can connect to VLC and use its functionality:

1.libVLC API – the VLC Core, for C, C++, and C#
 2.VLCKit – an Objective-C framework for Mac OS X
3.JavaScript API – the evolution of ActiveX API and Firefox integration
4.D-Bus controls
5.Go binding
6.C# interface
7.Python controls
8.Java API
9.Delphi/Pascal API: PasLibVlc by: "Robert Jędrzejczyk"
10.Free Pascal bindings and an OOP wrapper component, via the libvlc.pp and vlc.pp units. This comes standard with the Free Pascal Compiler as of 2012-11-06.
11.The Phonon multimedia API for Qt and KDE applications can optionally use VLC as a backend.

Browser plugins

VLC can handle some incomplete files and in some cases can be used to preview files being downloaded. Several programs make use of this, including eMule and KCeasy. The free/open-source Internet television application Miro also uses VLC code. HandBrake, an open-source video encoder, loads libdvdcss from VLC Media Player.

Applications that use the VLC plugin

VLC can handle some incomplete files and in some cases can be used to preview files being downloaded. Several programs make use of this, including eMule and KCeasy. The free/open-source Internet television application Miro also uses VLC code. HandBrake, an open-source video encoder, loads libdvdcss from VLC Media Player.

Format support

Input formats

VLC can read several formats, depending on the operating system VLC is running on, including:[38]

Container formats

3GP,[39] ASF, AVI, DVR-MS, FLV, Matroska, MIDI,[40] QuickTime File Format, MP4, Ogg, OGM, WAV, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), AIFF, Raw audio, Raw DV, MXF, VOB, RM, DVD-Video,
VCD, SVCD, CD Audio, DVB

Video formats

Cinepak, Dirac, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3,[41] MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo 3&4,[42] Sorenson, Theora, VC-1,[43] VP5,[43] VP6,[43] VP8, DNxHD, Prores and some WMV.

Audio formats

AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR,[39] DTS, DV Audio, XM, FLAC, MACE, Mod, Monkey's Audio, MP3, Opus,[44] PLS, QCP, QDM2/QDMC, RealAudio,Speex, Screamtracker 3/S3M, TTA, Vorbis, WavPack,[46] WMA (WMA 1/2, WMA 3 partially).

Subtitles

DVD-Video, SVCD, DVB, OGM, SubStation Alpha, SubRip, Advanced SubStation Alpha, MPEG-4 Timed Text, Text file, VobSub, MPL2,Teletext.

Network protocols
   
UDP, RTP (unicast or multicast), HTTP, FTP, MMS, RTSP, RTMP, RSS/Atom

Output formats

VLC can transcode or stream audio and video into several formats depending on the operating system, including:

Container formats

ASF, AVI, FLV,Fraps,MP4, Ogg, WAV, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), MPJPEG, FLAC, QuickTime File Format, Matroska, WebM

Video formats

H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, VP5,VP6, VP8,Theora, DV

Audio formats

AAC, AC-3, DV Audio, FLAC, MP3,Speex, Vorbis

Streaming protocols

UDP, HTTP, RTP, RTSP, MMS

Legality

The VLC media player software installers for the Mac OS X platform and the Windows platform include the libdvdcss DVD decryption library, even though this library may be legally restricted in certain jurisdictions.

USA

The VLC media player software is able to read video and audio data from DVDs that incorporate Content Scramble System (CSS) encryption, even though the VLC media player software lacks a CSS decryption license.The unauthorized decryption of CSS-encrypted DVD content or unauthorized distribution of CSS decryption tools may violate the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act,although the decryption of CSS-encrypted DVD content has been temporarily authorized for certain purposes (such as documentary filmmaking that uses short portions of DVD content for criticism or commentary) under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act anticircumvention exemptions that were issued by the US Copyright Office in 2010.(These exemptions do not change the DMCA's ban on the distribution of CSS decryption tools.)