VideoLAN is a project of French students from the École Centrale Paris and developers from all over the world. VideoLAN allows you to stream MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and DivX files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on a high-bandwidth IPv4 or IPv6 network in unicast or multicast under many operating systems.

VideoLAN also features a cross-plaform multimedia player, VLC, which can be used to read the stream from the network or display video read locally on the computer under Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS, BSD, Solaris, QNX, Familiar Linux...

You can use VLC to stream live from a camera or a webcam under Linux, or you can use VLS to stream digital satellite channels and digital terrestial TV channels.

VideoLAN is free software, and is released under the GNU General Public License.

The VideoLAN streaming solution includes:

VLS (VideoLAN Server), which can stream MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on the network in unicast or multicast, VLS can stream :

an MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 files stored on a hard drive or on a CD, a DVD located in a local DVD drive or copied on a hard disk, a satellite card or a digital terrestial television card, an MPEG encoding card ;

to :

one machine (i.e. to one IP address) : this is called unicast ; a dynamic group of machines that the clients can join or leave (i.e. to a multicast IP address).

A Pentium 100 MHz with 32 MB of memory should be enough to send one stream on the network. When streaming a lot of videos stored on a hard drive, the actual limitation is not the processor but the hard drive and the network connection.

VLC (initialy VideoLAN Client), which can be used as a server and to used as a client to receive, decode and display MPEG streams under multiple operating systems.

VLC - the cross-platform media player VLC (VideoLAN Client), works under Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, *BSD, Solaris, Familiar Linux and QNX. And is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. To get the complete list of VLC's possibilities on each platform supported, see the VLC features page. It can read :

MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files from a hard disk or a CD-ROM drive, DVDs and VCDs, from a satellite card, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 streams from the network sent by VLS or VLC's stream output.

VLC can also be used as a server to stream :

MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files, DVDs, from an MPEG encoding card,

to :

one machine (i.e. to one IP address) : this is called unicast ; a dynamic group of machines that the clients can join or leave (i.e. to a multicast IP address).

This diagram illustrates the VideoLAN solution:

VLC's stream output works under Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS and many Unices. VLS works under Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. For more information on VLC's stream output and VLS, see the streaming features page.

The network on which you setup the VideoLAN solution can be as small as one ethernet 10/100Mb switch or hub, and as big as you need it.

The bandwidth needed is:

0.5 to 4 Mbit/s for an MPEG-4 stream, 3 to 4 Mbit/s for an MPEG-2 stream read from a satellite card, a digital terrestial television card or an MPEG-2 encoding card, 6 to 9 Mbit/s for a DVD.

You can add a channel information service based on the SAP/SDP standard to the VideoLAN solution. The mini-SAP-server sends announces about the multicast programs on the network, and VLCs receive these annouces and automatically add the programs announced to their playlist. The mini-SAP-server works under Linux and Mac OS X.

For further information, please visit VideoLAN.