The VideoLAN project has announced that it is celebrating its tenth anniversary of open source as 1 February marks the tenth anniversary of the organisation's switch to the GPL license. To celebrate, the developers will be posting ten days of "surprises, ideas and stories" to the 10 years of open source events page – the first day provides a history of the VideoLAN project.

In 1996, the developers started their first project to push video across the network of the campus of the École Centrale Paris, a prestigious French "Grande École" university, noting that "this is 1996, were (sic) your average Pentium couldn't decode a DVD and when Youtube and Google didn't exist..." Following the success of their first project, the VideoLAN developers started their second project "from scratch" in 1998, which lead to the creation of the VLC Media Player.

VideoLAN is the name of both the project and the non-profit organisation, based in France. Its most recognised product is the well-known VLC Media Player, a free open source cross-platform multimedia player for various audio and video formats. Other projects include the x264 H.624 / AVC encoder, the libdvdcss C library for accessing DVDs without needing to decrypt them and libdvbcsa, a free implementation of the DVB Common Scrambling Algorithm.

See also:

VLC Media Player 1.1.7 addresses critical vulnerability, a report from The H.

(crve)