X-Git-Url: https://git.sesse.net/?a=blobdiff_plain;f=doc%2Fdeveloper%2Fhistory.xml;fp=doc%2Fdeveloper%2Fhistory.xml;h=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000;hb=171abe233158a6682c3f271b92f7fa1d97fc3dfe;hp=143eba4d7d5e35972a39256195a35bea1606741b;hpb=b3d6afc65d72e5ef1751c2e14642baf32cb335e3;p=vlc diff --git a/doc/developer/history.xml b/doc/developer/history.xml deleted file mode 100644 index 143eba4d7d..0000000000 --- a/doc/developer/history.xml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,132 +0,0 @@ - - Project history - - VIA and the Network2000 project - - -The whole project started back in 1995. At that time, students of the - École Centrale de Paris -enjoyed a TokenRing network, managed by the VIA Centrale Réseaux -association, and were looking -for a solution to upgrade to a modern network. So the idea behind -Network2000 was to find a project students would realize that would -be interesting, would require a high-quality network, and could -provide enough fame so that sponsors would be interested. - - - -Someone came up with the idea of doing television broadcast on the -network, so that students could watch TV in their room. This was -interesting, mixed a lot of cool technologies, and provided fame -because no one had written a free MPEG-2 decoder so far. - - - - - Foundation of the VideoLAN project - - - 3Com, - Bouygues and -la Société des Amis were -interested and financed the project, which was then known after -the name of VideoLAN. - - - -The VideoLAN team, in particular -Michel Lespinasse (current maintainer of LiViD's mpeg2dec) -and Régis -Duchesne, started writing code in 1996. By the end of 1997 they had -a working client-server solution, but it would crash a lot and was -hard to extend. - - - -At that time it was still closed-source and only-for-demo code. - - - - - VLC media player design - - -In 1998, Vincent Seguin -(structure, interface and video output), - Christophe Massiot -(input and video decoder), - Michel Kaempf -(audio decoder and audio output) and - Jean-Marc Dressler -(synchronization) decided to write a brand new player from scratch, -called VideoLAN Client (VLC), so that it could be easily open sourced. -Of course we based it on code written by our predecessors, but in -an advanced structure, described in the first chapter (it hasn't been -necessary to change it a lot). - - - -At the same time, Benoît -Steiner started the writing of an advanced stream server, called -VideoLAN Server (VLS). - - - -Functional test seeds have been released internally in June 1999 -(vlc-DR1) and November 1999 (vlc-DR2), and we started large scale tests -and presentations. The French audience discovered us at Linux Expo -in June 1999, presenting our 20 minutes of Golden Eye (which is now -a legend among developers :-). At that time only a network input was -possible, file input was added later, but it remained kludgy for a while. - - - -In early 2000, we (especially Samuel -Hocevar, who is still a major contributor) started working -on DVDs (PS files, AC3, SPU). In the summer 2000, pre-release builds -have been seeded (0.2.0 versions), but they still lacked essential -features. - - - -In late 2000, Christophe Massiot - with the support of his company, - IDEALX, rewrote major -parts of the input to allow modularization and advanced navigation, and Stéphane Borel worked on a -fully-featured DVD plug-in for VLC. - - - - - The Opening - - -For Linux Expo in February 2001, the -Free Software Foundation and -IDEALX wanted to make live streaming of the 2001 FSF awards -from Paris to New York. VideoLAN was the chosen solution. Finally -it couldn't be done live because of bandwidth considerations, but a - chain of -fully open-source solutions made it possible to record it. - - - -At the same time, the president of the -École Centrale Paris officially decided to place the software -under GNU General Public Licence, thanks to Henri Fallon, Jean-Philippe Rey, and the IDEALX team. - - - -VideoLAN software is now one of the most popular open source DVD -players available, and has contributors all around the world. The -last chapter of this appendix is not written yet :-). - - - - -