It also has its own protocol implementations. The libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project provides many of VLC's codecs, but the player mainly uses its own muxers and demuxers.
The default distribution of VLC includes many free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins. It is able to stream media over computer networks and can transcode multimedia files. VLC supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-Video, video CD and streaming protocols. VLC is also available on digital distribution platforms such as Apple's App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store.
VLC is available for desktop operating systems and mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS and iPadOS. VLC media player (previously the VideoLAN Client and commonly known as simply VLC) is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. GPL-2.0-or-later with some libraries under LGPL-2.1-or-later Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, Chrome OS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, Xbox system software GUI: C++ (with Qt), Objective-C (with Cocoa), Swift, Java
