VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multi-platform multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, Ogg, OGM, MOV, wma, wmv...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

The VideoLAN project targets multimedia streaming of 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 OSes. VideoLAN also features a cross-platform multimedia player, VLC, which can be used to read the stream from the network or display video read locally on the computer under all GNU/Linux flavours, all BSD flavours, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, QNX, Familiar Linux

Building on feedback from the 29 million downloads of VLC media player 0.8.5, we bring you version 0.8.6 with many bugfixes, as well as a couple of new features we think you will truly enjoy. Most prominent are probably Windows Media Video 9 and Flash Video. Other important changes are improved H.264 decoding, better Windows Unicode support, a Fullscreen controller and Apple Remote support for Mac OS X.

Features in VLC (VideoLAN Client):

- Rewrite of the playlist (tree structure, input preparsing ...)
- Preferences improvements
- XML parsers
- Client-side SSL/TLS support
- Massive Matroska improvements
- Support for SOCKS proxy
- Support for Shoutcast Meta-data
- Support for (HE-)AAC raw-audio streams
- TiVo demuxer
- Samba (Windows shares) access module
- Dirac decoder and encoder
- PNG decoder/encoder
- Support for Apple Lossless Audio Codec
- Services discovery modules (brand new SAP module, HAL discovery, DAAP (iTunes shares), shoutcast)
- Support for 20/24 bits LPCM
- Video snapshot support (png or jpg)
- Image file video output (png)
- Mosaic (picture-in-picture system)
- Pocket PC port
- Brand new Internet Explorer ActiveX plugin