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-<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
-<appendix> <title> Project history </title>
-
- <sect1> <title> VIA and the Network2000 project </title>
-
- <para>
-The whole project started back in 1995. At that time, students of the
-<ulink url="http://www.ecp.fr/"> École Centrale de Paris </ulink>
-enjoyed a TokenRing network, managed by the <ulink
-url="http://www.via.ecp.fr/"> VIA Centrale Réseaux
-association</ulink>, 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.
- </para>
-
- <para>
-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.
- </para>
-
- </sect1>
-
- <sect1> <title> Foundation of the VideoLAN project </title>
-
- <para>
-<ulink url="http://www.3com.com/"> 3Com</ulink>,
-<ulink url="http://www.bouygues.com/"> Bouygues </ulink> and
-la Société des Amis were
-interested and financed the project, which was then known after
-the name of VideoLAN.
- </para>
-
- <para>
-The VideoLAN team, in particular <ulink url="mailto:walken@via.ecp.fr">
-Michel Lespinasse </ulink> (current maintainer of <ulink
-url="http://www.linuxvideo.org/">LiViD</ulink>'s mpeg2dec)
-and <ulink url="mailto:hpreg@via.ecp.fr"> Régis
-Duchesne</ulink>, 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.
- </para>
-
- <para>
-At that time it was still closed-source and only-for-demo code.
- </para>
-
- </sect1>
-
- <sect1> <title> VLC media player design </title>
-
- <para>
-In 1998, <ulink url="mailto:seguin@via.ecp.fr"> Vincent Seguin</ulink>
-(structure, interface and video output),
-<ulink url="mailto:massiot@via.ecp.fr"> Christophe Massiot</ulink>
-(input and video decoder),
-<ulink url="mailto:maxx@via.ecp.fr"> Michel Kaempf</ulink>
-(audio decoder and audio output) and
-<ulink url="mailto:polux@via.ecp.fr"> Jean-Marc Dressler</ulink>
-(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).
- </para>
-
- <para>
-At the same time, <ulink url="mailto:benny@via.ecp.fr"> Benoît
-Steiner </ulink> started the writing of an advanced stream server, called
-VideoLAN Server (VLS).
- </para>
-
- <para>
-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.
- </para>
-
- <para>
-In early 2000, we (especially <ulink url="mailto:sam@via.ecp.fr"> Samuel
-Hocevar</ulink>, 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.
- </para>
-
- <para>
-In late 2000, <ulink url="mailto:massiot@via.ecp.fr"> Christophe Massiot
-</ulink> with the support of his company,
-<ulink url="http://www.idealx.com/"> IDEALX</ulink>, rewrote major
-parts of the input to allow modularization and advanced navigation, and <ulink
-url="mailto:stef@via.ecp.fr"> Stéphane Borel </ulink> worked on a
-fully-featured DVD plug-in for VLC.
- </para>
-
- </sect1>
-
- <sect1> <title> The Opening </title>
-
- <para>
-For Linux Expo in February 2001, the <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/">
-Free Software Foundation </ulink> and <ulink url="http://www.idealx.com/">
-IDEALX </ulink> 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
-<ulink url="http://www.via.ecp.fr/~massiot/encoding.html"> chain of
-fully open-source solutions </ulink> made it possible to record it.
- </para>
-
- <para>
-At the same time, the president of the <ulink url="http://www.ecp.fr/">
-École Centrale Paris</ulink> officially decided to place the software
-under GNU General Public Licence, thanks to <ulink
-url="mailto:henri@via.ecp.fr"> Henri Fallon</ulink>, <ulink
-url="mailto:jprey@ads.ecp.fr"> Jean-Philippe Rey</ulink>, and the IDEALX team.
- </para>
-
- <para>
-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 :-).
- </para>
-
- </sect1>
-
-</appendix>
projects / vlc / blobdiff