Media player VLC exists twenty years

Chances are if you grab a file, change the extension to some random letters, then load it into VLC, you’ll be presented with a working 4k movie. The video player known for playing everything is twenty years old.

The VideoLAN Client, or simply VLC, has been around since February 1, 2001. This makes the software more than two decades old, but still incredibly popular. Then the software was released by the French maker VideoLAN under a GNU-GPL license. Since then, according to maker VideoLAN, the player has been downloaded at least 3.5 billion times. There’s probably a lot of duplication in there, as VLC remains one of the first programs for many users to download onto a new computer.

The media player is VideoLAN’s best-known product, but certainly not the only one. For example, the organization also developed the widely used codec x264. Work was also done on other streaming software, codes and libraries such as libdca, liba52 and libmpeg2. The software is therefore best known for its ability to play virtually any file format if it is even slightly related to audio or video.

Since its inception, VideoLAN has also always remained a foundation with the aim of always keeping the software free. That has happened so far and unlike many other software, VLC does not contain any ads, upselling or bloatware. According to the makers, at least a thousand volunteers have contributed to the software in one way or another in recent years.