In 2001, after many months (if not years) of negotiation, the school's Director agreed to a change to the GPL licence. This allowed easy porting of the OS specific modules. These two programs were planned to be modular, which meant a core consisting basically of communication functions to be used by the modules.

They succeeded in serving and reading the first stream in 1998. They began writing VLS (VideoLAN Server) and the VLC (VideoLAN Client) to stream and read MPEG-2 streams. (They also wanted to upgrade the VIA Centrale Réseaux network so they needed a bandwidth intensive application to justify the upgrade.) These students wanted to be able to watch television on their PCs. The VideoLAN project was started as a school project in 1996 by students of École Centrale Paris, a French engineering school. Over the years, around 1000 volunteers worked to make VLC a reality.It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Documentation:History.

VLC is today available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android (including TV and Auto versions), iOS (and AppleTV), OS/2 and BSD. Today, VLC media player is used regularly by hundreds of millions of users, and has been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times over the years.

Since then, the project evolved to become a French non-profit organization, and continued developing numerous solutions around the free software multimedia world. At that time, this was a risky decision for the Ecole Centrale Paris, and the VideoLAN project is very grateful. This open sourcing concerned all the software developed by the VideoLAN project, including VideoLAN Client, VideoLAN Server, VideoLAN Bridge, VideoLAN Channel Switcher, but also libraries to decode DVDs, like libdca, liba52 or libmpeg2. Gourisse, allowed the open-sourcing of the whole VideoLAN project under the GNU GPL. But the true release of the project to the world was on 1st of February 2001, the Ecole Centrale Paris director, Mr. VideoLAN originally started as a project from the Via Centrale Reseaux student association, after the successful Network 2000 project. VideoLAN, in a blog post: The VideoLAN project and the VideoLAN non-profit organization are happy to celebrate today the 20th anniversary of the open-sourcing of the project.

Videolan project