"VLC started out in 1996 as a student project at ECP - École Centrale Paris (now merged into CentraleSupélec). Libération has some of the early history. This includes some gems: French telco Bouygues offered to sponsor faster site-to-site links, if the students worked out a way to stream Télévision Française 1 over them. The students, predictably, also wanted to play Doom over the new links."
"The only MPEG2 file they had for early testing was a 20-minute clip of the James Bond film GoldenEye, which is why that was the code name of VLC 1.0.x. (GoldenEye, incidentally, isn't a James Bond story. It's the name of Ian Fleming's villa in Jamaica.) Initially, VLC was only part of a larger project, a client for playing back MPEG2 streams from a separate server, called the VideoLAN Server. So there were two parts: VLS and VLC, the VideoLAN Client."
"So far, nothing was done [with VCs], because if we ever do something, we need to find a business model that actually adds value for the users. Most business models we've been proposed were linked to shipping toolbars and other crapware while installing VLC. This is not interesting for us. Or, as other sites put it, he is the one who kept VLC free - because, had he sold out and let the app run advertising or worse, he could likely have become seriously wealthy."
VLC is a free, cross-platform media player capable of playing nearly any media format on many platforms. Jean-Baptiste Kempf maintains the project and refused venture-capital funding models tied to adware or toolbars, preserving user-focused, ad-free distribution. Kempf received the European SFS Award 2025 at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference in Bolzano, Italy. VLC began in 1996 as a student project at École Centrale Paris and originated as a client for MPEG2 streams paired with a separate VideoLAN Server. Early testing used a 20-minute MPEG2 clip of GoldenEye, which became the code name for VLC 1.0.x.
Read at Theregister
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]