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Since then, VLC has been downloaded close to one billion times.
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The VideoLAN project was started at the university École Centrale Paris who relicensed VLC under the GPLv2 license in February 2001. The interface is functional, but by no means attractive - but you can download skins to change VLC Media Player appearance. VLC can play most multimedia files, discs, streams, allows playback from devices, and is able to convert to or stream in various formats. Using open source technologies and libraries, VLC has been ported to most computing platforms, including GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, iOS and Android. VLC media player is a popular libre and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as Blu-Ray, DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.
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