VideoLAN - Press Release - Server hosts change - VideoLAN
VideoLAN, a project and a non-profit organization.

The VideoLAN website gets a new home

VideoLAN is the software development project behind the open-source VLC media player (VLC), a cross-platform media player and streaming solution, some widely used audio/video encoding/decoding and decryption open-source libraries, and IP network streaming tools.

Ever since its inception in 1996 by visionary students, the project has been hosted on the campus of the École Centrale Paris (ECP), a famous French engineering university ("Grande École"). Internet bandwidth was provided by ECP, while the actual hosting was carried out by VIA Centrale Réseaux, the student association that manages the campus network.

The project eventually went open-source in early 2001. From then on, contributors from all over the world started contributing, and VLC was ported to Windows within about 3 months.

As VLC popularity rose, so did the bandwidth usage of our main web server. We did upgrade our web server since then (thanks to HP and IBM), and the campus network connection from 10 to 100 Mbps. However, our needs kept growing, beyond what the School could provide us with. At that time, the French ISP Free S.A.S. offered us a free hosting in one of their datacenters near Paris, with an upgraded network bandwidth.

In the perceived interest of our users and contributors, we have hence decided to leave our historical home and to accept this offer.

We wish to thank both Free for their generous offer and their precious help, and ECP for its support during the last 8 years, since the very beginning of the project.
We hope that the relationship between VideoLAN and VIA will continue for a long time.

The VideoLAN project
videolanremovethis@videolan.org

References :

VideoLAN project :
http://www.videolan.org/
Free :
http://www.free.fr/
École Centrale Paris :
http://www.ecp.fr/
VIA Centrale Réseaux (campus network student association) :
http://www.via.ecp.fr/