VLC media player
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| VLC media player | |
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|---|---|
 VLC for Mac OS X playing the film San Francisco Earthquake aftermath, 1906 |
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| Maintainer: | VideoLAN Project |
| Stable release: | 0.8.6a (January 4, 2007) [+/-] |
| Preview release: | SVN (SVN) [+/-] |
| OS: | Cross-platform |
| Use: | Media player |
| License: | GPL |
| Website: | www.videolan.org/vlc |
VLC media player is a free software (GPL) media player by the VideoLAN project.
It is a highly portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. VLC used to stand for "VideoLan Client", but that meaning is deprecated[1].
It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Windows CE, and Solaris, and is widely used with almost 30 million downloads for version 0.8.5.[2]
VLC uses a large number of free/open source decoding and encoding libraries, and many of its codecs are provided by the libavcodec codec library from the FFmpeg project. The muxer and demuxers are proper to VLC. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library.
Version 0.8.6, which adds support for WMV version 9 and enhances support for H.264, was released on 10 December 2006[3].
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[edit] History
VLC was initially the client for the VideoLAN project, which aimed to create a program to stream videos across a network. It was originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris, and was released under the GPL license on the 1 February 2001. It is now developed by contributors worldwide.
VLC was the client application for VideoLAN, with VLC standing for "VideoLAN Client". The project also created a server program, VideoLAN Server (VLS), whose functionality has mainly been included in VLC. The VideoLAN Server has since been deprecated. The VLC name has therefore changed to "VLC media player", since there is no longer a client/server infrastructure.
The cone icon is a reference to the traffic cones collected by Ecole Centrale's Networking Students' Association.[4] The cone icon design was changed from a hand drawn low resolution icon[5] to a higher resolution CGI rendered version in 2006.[6]
[edit] Design principles
VLC has a very modular design, which makes it easier to include modules for new file formats and streaming methods. This principle stretches to other areas, and there are a selection of interface and video output modules.
[edit] Interfaces
The standard GUI is based on wxWidgets for Windows/Linux, Cocoa for Mac OS X, and Be API on BeOS; but all give a similar standard interface. A Qt 4 interface is also in the works for Linux and Windows[7].
VLC also supports highly personalizable skins through the skins2 interface. VLC also supports Winamp2 and XMMS skins.
For console fans, VLC has 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 special interfaces allowing this. The Remote Control Interface is a text-based interface for doing this; and there are also interfaces using telnet and HTTP (AJAX).
[edit] Control
In addition to these interfaces, it is possible to control VLC in different ways:
- Configurable hotkeys
- Mouse Gestures
- Lirc and infrared controllers
[edit] Features
- VLC is very popular for its ability to play the video content of incomplete, unfinished, or damaged video downloads before the files have been fully downloaded. This comes from the fact that it is a packet-based player. For example, files simultaneously downloading through BitTorrent or eMule.
- Another interesting feature of this player is the ability to use libcdio to access .iso files so that the user can play files on a disk image, even if the user's operating system does not have the capability of working directly with .iso images.
- VLC supports all codecs and all file formats supported by FFmpeg. This means that DVD Video and MPEG-4 playback as well as support for Ogg and Matroska (MKV) file formats work "out of the box". However, this feature is not unique to VLC, as any player, including MPlayer and xine, using the FFmpeg libraries can play those formats without need for external codecs. However VLC also supports codecs that are not inside FFmpeg.
- VLC media player has some filters that can distort, rotate, split, deinterlace, mirror videos, create display walls, or add a logo. It can also produce video output 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. An entire library of tapes (or about 50 D-VHS 2 hours long) can be placed on a single terabyte sized hard drive. However, they must be played in real time on D-VHS, and can't simply be copied as data files.
- Through a simple FireWire connection from cable boxes to computers, VLC streams live unencrypted content to a monitor or HDTV.
- VLC media player can set the playing video as wallpaper.
- On Microsoft Windows, VLC also supports the Direct Media Object (DMO) framework and can therefore make use of some third-party DLLs.
[edit] Use of VLC with other programs
[edit] API
There are several APIs to connect and use VLC functionalities:
- libVLC API, which is the VLC Core, for C and C++,
- JS API, which is the evolution of ActiveX API and Firefox integration,
- D-Bus Controls,
- C# interface,
- python controls,
- Java API.
[edit] Browser plugins
- On Windows, Linux, and some other platforms, VLC provides a NPAPI plugin,[1] which lets people view some QuickTime and Windows Media files embedded in websites without using Microsoft or Apple products. It supports Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite and Safari, but does not yet work with Opera. This plugin was initially used by Google to build the Google Video webbrowser plugin[2], which currently uses Adobe Flash.
- Starting with version 0.8.2, VLC also provides an ActiveX plugin, which lets people view some QuickTime (MOV) and Windows Media files embedded in websites when browsing with Internet Explorer.
[edit] Applications which use the VLC plugin
- VLC is good at handling incomplete files and so can be used to preview files being downloaded; several programs make use of this, including eMule and KCeasy.
- The free/open-source Democracy Player also uses VLC code.
- The Songbird media browser joins code from VLC and Firefox.
A few other applications use VLC for playback: We use VideoLAN
[edit] Formats and codecs
[edit] Readable formats
VLC can read several formats, depending on the operating system.[8]
- Input
- UDP/RTP unicast or multicast, HTTP, FTP, MMS, DVDs, VCD, SVCD, CD Audio, DVB (Only Linux), Video acquisition (via V4l and DirectShow), RSS/Atom Feeds, and from files stored on your computer.
- Container formats
- 3gp[9], ASF, AVI, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, Wav, MPEG-2 (ES,PS,TS,PVA,MP3), AIFF, Raw audio, Raw DV, FLAC
- Video codecs
- Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3[10], MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo[11] , Sorenson, Theora, VC-1[12], VP5[12], VP6[12], WMV
- Subtitles
- DVD, SVCD, DVB, OGM, Substation Alpha, Advanced Substation Alpha, MPEG-4 Timed Text, Text files, Vobsub, MPL2 [13], Teletext [13]
- Audio codecs
- AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR[9], DTS, DV Audio, FLAC, MACE, MP3, QDM2/QDMC, RealAudio[14], Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA
[edit] Output formats for streaming/encoding
VLC can transcode into several formats depending on the operating system.
- Container formats
- ASF, AVI, FLV[13], MP4, Ogg, Wav, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), MPJPEG, FLAC
- Video codecs
- H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, VP5[12], VP6[12], Theora, RealVideo[11] , DV
- Audio codecs
- AAC, AC3, DV Audio, FLAC, MP3 [15], Speex, Vorbis
- Streaming protocols
- UDP, HTTP, RTP, MMS, File
[edit] Trivia
- VLC release code-names are named after characters in GoldenEye.[3]
- One of the "features" scheduled to be added for version 1.0.0 is "World Domination".[4]
[edit] See also
- List of video players (software)
- List of media players
- Comparison of media players
- List of multimedia (audio/video) codecs
- xine, MPlayer
- MEncoder
[edit] References
- ^ Jean-Baptiste Kempf (November 23, 2006). VLC Name. Yet another blog for JBKempf. Retrieved on February 24, 2007.
- ^ Download Statistics. VideoLAN Project. Retrieved on December 11, 2006.
- ^ Derk-Jan Hartman (10 December, 2006). Release notification, 0.8.6. videolan-announce mailing list. Retrieved on February 24, 2007.
- ^ Jon Lech Johansen (June 23, 2005). VLC cone. So sue me: Jon Lech Johansen’s blog. Retrieved on February 24, 2007.
- ^ vlc48x48.png (PNG). VideoLAN Project. Retrieved on February 24, 2007.
- ^ vlc128x128.png (PNG). VideoLAN Project. Retrieved on February 24, 2007.
- ^ Jean-Baptiste Kempf (February 10, 2007). Qt4 Interface. Yet another blog for JBKempf. Retrieved on March 7, 2007.
- ^ VLC features list. VideoLAN Project. Retrieved on February 24, 2007.
- ^ a b To use AMR as audio codec, vlc and ffmpeg need to be compiled with amr support. This is because the amr license is not compatible with the vlc license.
- ^ Indeo 4 and 5 codecs are not supported
- ^ a b Real Video 9 and 10 are not supported
- ^ a b c d e This is from 0.8.6 version
- ^ a b c This will be in 0.9.0
- ^ Real Audio playback is provided through the FFmpeg-library which does only support the Cook (RealAudio G2 / RealAudio 8) decoder at the moment.
- ^ You need to compile VLC with mp3lame support
[edit] External links
