VideoLAN is the software development project behind the open-source
VLC media player (VLC), a cross-platform media player and
streaming solution, some widely used audio/video encoding/decoding
and decryption open-source libraries, and IP network streaming tools.
Ever since its inception in 1996 by visionary students, the project has
been hosted on the campus of the École Centrale Paris (ECP),
a famous French engineering university ("Grande École").
Internet bandwidth was provided by ECP, while the actual hosting was
carried out by VIA Centrale Réseaux,
the student association that manages the campus network.
The project eventually went open-source in early 2001.
From then on, contributors from all over the world started contributing,
and VLC was ported to Windows within about 3 months.
As VLC popularity rose, so did the bandwidth usage of our main web
server. We did upgrade our web server since then (thanks to HP and IBM),
and the campus network connection from 10 to 100 Mbps.
However, our needs kept growing, beyond what the School could provide us
with. At that time, the French ISP Free S.A.S. offered us a free hosting in
one of their datacenters near Paris, with an upgraded network bandwidth.
In the perceived interest of our users and contributors, we have
hence decided to leave our historical home and to accept this offer.
We wish to thank both Free for their generous offer and their
precious help, and ECP for its support during the last 8 years, since
the very beginning of the project.
We hope that the relationship between VideoLAN and VIA will continue for
a long time.
The VideoLAN project
videolanremovethis@videolan.org
