VideoLAN is a complete software solution for video streaming, developed by students at the Ecole Centrale Paris and contributors from all over the world, under the General Public License (GPL). It has been designed for streaming MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 videos on local area networks (LAN), but it can be extended to metropolitan or wide area networks (MAN, WAN), thanks to the multicast technology.
The VideoLAN solution includes a server, which can stream video from various sources (file, DVD, satellite and MPEG 2 encoder), a client, which can receive, decode and display MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 streams and, if necessary, a channel server which tells automatically to the client the parameters needed to receive the stream.
Here is an illustration of the complete VideoLAN solution :
DVD --->- Unicast/Broadcast/Multicast \ --- File --->-- -------- / \ -------- |->-| Server |=====>====| LAN |---->-----| Client | Satellite ->-- | (VLS) | \ / | (VLC) | / -------- --- -------- MPEG2 -->- ^ encoder | v ---------------- | Channel Server | | (VLCS) | ----------------More details about the project can be found on the VideoLAN Web site.
Copyright (©) 2002 by the VideoLAN project.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation ; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. The text of the license can be found on http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
There are four main documents :
The up-to-date version of these documents can be found on the VideoLAN Web site.
The VideoLAN Server (vls
) can read videos from :
and stream it on the network in MPEG2-TS format to :
The VideoLAN Server is supposed to work under any Unix-like operating system. A Windows port exists since version 0.3.3, but at the moment it can only stream files stored an a disk (Video, DVB and DVD inputs are not supported yet)
You will need libdvdread if you want to stream DVDs with vls, and libdvdcss for reading encrypted DVDs.
DVB support requires libdvbpsi and the DVB drivers installed.
Vls is a very light software and needs few ressources. A Pentium 100 MHz with 32 MB of memory should be enough for broadcasting one stream (then it takes about 50% of CPU time). On my Pentium III 800 MHz, I can broadcast more than 5 streams and vls eats less than 1% of CPU ! When broadcasting a lot of streams stored on a hard disk, the actual limitation is not the processor but the disk (especially when using IDE disks).
If you have any questions about the VideoLAN Server, you can contact us at the mailing-list vls@videolan.org