The functionality of the server-program, VideoLan Server (VLS), has mostly been subsumed into VLC and has been deprecated. Rewritten from scratch in 1998, it was released under GNU General Public License on February 1, 2001, with authorization from the headmaster of the École Centrale Paris. Originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris, it is now developed by contributors worldwide and is coordinated by VideoLAN, a non-profit organization. It was intended to consist of a client and server to stream videos from satellite dishes across a campus network. Since VLC is no longer merely a client, that initialism no longer applies.

VLC used to stand for 'VideoLAN Client' when VLC was a client of the VideoLAN project. The VideoLAN software originated as a French academic project in 1996. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux and macOS by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library however, this library is legally controversial and is not included in many software repositories of Linux distributions as a result. It also has its own protocol implementations.

The libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project provides many of VLC's codecs, but the player mainly uses its own muxers and demuxers. The default distribution of VLC includes many free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins. It is able to stream media over computer networks and can transcode multimedia files. VLC supports many audio- and video-compression-methods and file-formats, including DVD-Video, Video CD, and streaming- protocols. VLC is also available on digital distribution platforms such as Apple's App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store. VLC is available for desktop operating systems and mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS and iPadOS. VLC media player (previously the VideoLAN Client and commonly known as simply VLC) is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. GPL-2.0-or-later with some libraries under LGPL-2.1-or-later VLC for iOS (MPLv2.0) Windows, ReactOS, macOS, Linux, Android, ChromeOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, Xbox system software GUI: C++ (with Qt), Objective-C (with Cocoa), Swift, Java

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