The VideoLAN Organization is a non-profit foundation known for developing multimedia software for playing and streaming video and audio in different media formats across a local area network.The project originally worked on 2 programs only, VideoLAN Client and VideoLAN Server, better recognized as VLC and VLS.Today, as most of VideoLAN Server’s features have been integrated into VLC, the software is called VLC media player. VideoLAN is most famous for its flagship invention, VLC media player.The VideoLAN project began in 1996, as a student assignment at the French Ecole Centrale Paris. In 1998, it was completely rewritten and made into an Open Source.
The Ecole Centrale Paris agreement in 2001 made this possible.The software was released under the General Public License as free software and now it is a multinational project.France-based VideoLAN organization backs up the VideoLAN project. The non-profit organization has members and committee who are an integral part of the VideoLAN project.The board comprises of 3 essential figures.
The current President of the non-profit organization is Jean-Baptiste Kempf. He is also one of the developers for the VideoLAN project. Ludovic Fauvet is the treasurer and Felix Paul Kuhne is the secretary.The project gradually began to open up to developers from outside the Ecole and now it is finally a worldwide project. VideoLAN has developers from 20 different countries working on it.The entire project is composed and led by this dedicated team of volunteers.
They strongly believe in the power of open source when working with multimedia.Any programmers, writer, translators, moderators and designers who want to contribute are welcome in the team.Programmers can review the developer documentation, check the bug-tracking system, subscribe to the mailing-lists, etc. Writers can contribute by improving the documentation, translators can translate projects and moderators can support by posting answers on the forums and mailing lists. Finally, designers can make the website and VLC better.
The non-profit organization works on donations only and so there are a variety of ways one can contribute to the success of this renowned company. VideoLan’s main needs are to buy hardware for developing and testing, to maintain servers and hardware to run the services and to promote the project by organizing events.If you want to donate money, you can choose the variety of options. Contributors may choose to pay in their dedicated bank account following the traditional payment system.
The option to pay via PayPal is also given.A very interesting aspect of the donation process is the option to pay in bitcoins, which many leading companies allow these days. For those who prefer to use their digital currency, there is a direct link to their Bitcoin wallet in the website’s contribution page.VideoLAN’s Bitcoin wallet address is 131sGMNPQCgQhUzezY1mjDKc7atieUuStK. Use can use the QR code provided in the webpage too.It was found by using blockchain.
info that 279 transactions were made in the organization’s wallet. The Bitcoin acceptance adds more options for those who want to help.VideoLAN is free and open source software which is not really backed by any particular company. The volunteers who work on their free time and the contributors are what make the organization so successful.