According to the VideoLAN Organization, the non-profit entity behind the popular VLC media player, the software has been downloaded more than one billion times.

These statistics encompass all downloads for VLC for Windows, Mac OS X, and in source form, from February 2005 onwards. Linux downloads are not included in the statistics since most Linux users download the program from their distribution's repository mirrors; therefore, the total number of VLC downloads is likely to be quite a bit higher.

The VLC project was started in 1998 at the French university École Centrale Paris and was open sourced in 2001. Since then it has become one of, if not the, most popular cross-platform media players. The latest release of VLC is version 2.0.1 from 19 March. VLC's source code is licensed under the GPLv2.

(fab)