by Gee Jay Coleco
VLC media player is an open source, free software media player written by the VideoLAN project. VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but that meaning is now deprecated.
The VideoLAN Project
The VideoLAN project is a project, lead and composed by a team of volunteers, that believes in the power of open source when dealing with multimedia.
VideoLAN logo on their website
The project started as a student project at the French École Centrale Paris, in 1996. After a complete rewrite in 1998, it became Open Source, based on the agreement of the École Centrale Paris in 2001.
The project started to open up to developers outside of the École. It is now a worldwide project with developers from 20 countries. Since 2009, the project is completly separated from École Centrale Paris, and is backed up by an autonomous non-profit organisation.
VLC v.1.0.1 announcement of released on their website last July 28, 2009
Although VLC media player is the most well-known VideoLAN project, they do host several other video-related projects, mostly aimed at software developers.
