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. VideoLAN is free software, and is released under the GNU General Public License. It started as a student project at the French A‰cole Centrale Paris but is now a worldwide project with developers from 20 countries.

Features:
Independant of systems codecs to support most video types
Live recording
Instant pausing and Frame-by-Frame support
Finer speed controls
New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-
Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, ...)
New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, ...) and major improvements in many formats...
New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
Video scaling in fullscreen
RTSP Trickplay support
Zipped file playback
Customizable toolbars
Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
Better integration in Gtk environments
MTP devices on linux
AirTunes streaming
New skin for the skins2 interface