VideoLAN, the company behind the popular media player VLC, has announced that its software has now been downloaded over one billion times since its launch in 2005.
The software is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and provides powerful playback functionality for free. It’s also open-source.
According to the company, VLC is most popular on the Windows platform, which is expected since Microsoft recently announced that it would no longer be bundling Windows Media Center in the future. VLC is a perfect way to play DVDs on your Microsoft machine.
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No codecs are needed, and VLC also plays audio files, along with the most popular video standards: MPEG-2, DivX, H.264, MKV, WebM, WMV, MP3.
VLC was made available to the iPhone and iPad, but was pulled by Apple at VideoLAN’s request. Here’s what the team had to say then:
At last, Apple has removed VLC media player from its application store. Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved – the hard way. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone, given the precedents.
A few VLC streaming apps still exist for iOS today, but none directly from the company.
➤ VLC
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