VLC media player (initially VideoLAN Client) is a media player from the VideoLAN project. It supports many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. It employs the libavcodec codec library from the FFmpeg project to handle many of the formats it supports, and uses the libdvdcss DVD decryption library to handle playback of encrypted DVDs. VLC also has the ability to convert many formats of media from one type to another.

VLC is also known for its relatively unique ability to play video files from uncompressed WinRAR archives saving the need to unpack (extract) the files from the rars. Also, it has the ability to let the user view the video content of incomplete, unfinished video downloads before they've been fully downloaded to the hard drive.