[14] The default distribution of VLC includes many free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins.

The libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project provides many of VLC's codecs, but the player mainly[15] uses its own muxers and demuxers.

Rewritten from scratch in 1998, it was released under GNU General Public License on February 1, 2001, with authorization from the headmaster of the École Centrale Paris.

[citation needed] In 2007 the VLC project decided, for license compatibility reasons, not to upgrade to the just-released GPLv3.

In December 2017 the European Parliament approved a budget that funds a bug bounty program for VLC to improve the EU's IT infrastructure.

VLC, like most multimedia frameworks, has a very modular design which makes it easier to include modules/plugins for new file formats, codecs, interfaces, or streaming methods.

The default GUI is based on Be API on BeOS, Cocoa for macOS, and Qt 5 for Linux and Windows, but all give a similar standard interface.

[56] The desktop version of VLC media player has some filters that can distort, rotate, split, deinterlace, and mirror videos as well as create display walls or add a logo overlay during playback.

[59] Playback can be gamified by splitting the picture inside the viewport into draggable puzzle pieces, where the row and column count can be set as desired.

It also plays m2t MPEG transport streams (.TS) files while they are still being digitized from an HDV camera via a FireWire cable, making it possible to monitor the video as it is being recorded.

This means that VLC can play back H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 2 video as well as support FLV or MXF file formats "out of the box" using FFmpeg's libraries.

VLC media player can play high-definition recordings of D-VHS tapes duplicated to a computer using CapDVHS.exe.

Using a FireWire connection from cable boxes to computers, VLC can stream live, unencrypted content to a monitor or HDTV.

VLC media player can record the desktop and save the stream as a file, allowing the user to create screencasts.

[61][62][63] On Microsoft Windows, VLC also supports the Direct Media Object (DMO) framework and can thus make use of some third-party DLLs (Dynamic-link library).

[67] A red Santa hat appears on top of VLC's traffic-cone logo during Christmas seasons.

On a Microsoft Windows PC open the Preferences by pressing Ctrl + p. Then click on the "Hotkeys" menu (top right of the screen).

Another Hindustan Times report from April quoting Symantec said that Chinese hackers were depending on VLC to launch malware they had previously installed on Windows machines.

[102] The technique they used is called DLL side-loading, in which an external library that a legitimate program loads at runtime is substituted with a modified version containing the malware.

[105] The VLC media player software is able to read audio and video data from DVDs that incorporate Content Scramble System (CSS) encryption, even though the VLC media player software lacks a CSS decryption license.

[106] Decryption of CSS-encrypted DVD content has been temporarily authorized for certain purposes (such as documentary filmmaking that uses short portions of DVD content for criticism or commentary) under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act anticircumvention exemptions that were issued by the US Copyright Office in 2010.