README.md

VLC media player

VLC is a libre and open source media player and multimedia engine, focused on playing everything, and running everywhere.

VLC can play most multimedia files, discs, streams, devices and is also able to convert, encode, stream and manipulate streams into numerous formats.

VLC is used by many over the world, on numerous platforms, for very different use cases.

The engine of VLC can be embedded into 3rd party applications, and is called libVLC.

VLC is part of the VideoLAN project and is developed and supported by a community of volunteers.

The VideoLAN project was started at the university École Centrale Paris who relicensed VLC under the GPLv2 license in February 2001. Since then, VLC has been downloaded billions of times.

License

VLC is released under the GPLv2 (or later) license. On some platforms, it is de facto GPLv3, because of the licenses of dependencies.

libVLC, the engine is released under the LGPLv2 (or later) license.
This allows embedding the engine in 3rd party applications, while letting them to be licensed under other licenses.