Since 2009, the project is completely separated from École Centrale Paris, and is driven by an autonomous non-profit organization.

It is now a worldwide project with developers from 40 countries. The project started to open up to developers outside of the École. In January 2003, the first MPEG4 streams were tested and realtime MPEG4 encoding Network were able to participate in these tests. Months later! The first large scale multicast streaming tests occurred in May 2002. One of them (gibalou) even submitted the Win32 port 6 In 2001, after many months (if not years) of negotiation, the school’s Director agreed to a change to the GPL licence.ĭevelopers from all around the world started working on the project right away.

This allowed easy porting of the OS specific modules. These two programs were planned to be modular, which meant a core consisting basically of communication functions They succeeded in serving and reading the first (VideoLAN Server) and the VLC (VideoLAN Client) to stream and read MPEG-2 streams. The VIA Centrale Réseaux network so they needed a bandwidth intensive application to justify the upgrade. These students wanted to be able to watch television on their PCs. The VideoLAN project was started as a school project in 1996 by students of Ecole Centrale Paris,Ī French engineering school in 1996.

Vlc by videolan