In 2007, he called everyone currently and formerly active on the project. That core of key contributors made Kempf’s plan to leave easier. (That one was Denis-Courmont.) “We were two and a half with me.” VLC had always been run by a small core team: Two to five people constantly worked on the project, and about a dozen others chipped in semi-regularly. “When I started to get very involved in the project, there was only one person really involved in the project, or one and a half,” says Kempf. The project has persisted in large part thanks to the organizers’ ability to adapt to the times and to make hard choices, like Kempf’s decision to lead VLC’s departure from the university rather than watch the project peter out.
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Having survived for more than two decades, with many of its current team in place for 15 years, the group has evolved from a small student project into a nonprofit and a consultancy, all while continuing to offer the free, open-source software that remains their raison d’être. In the years since then, VLC has undergone significant changes. That’s when he made a decision: In order to survive, VLC had to cut ties with École Centrale. “The project was dying at the university,” Kempf says. But VLC player became a victim of its own success: It outgrew its server, became too complicated for a succession of final-year students to maintain, and was soon outmoded by a curriculum change.īy 2007, “nobody was really taking any care of it,” says Rémi Denis-Courmont, a lead developer on VLC. He had started working on the project in November 2003, as a student. “It was a bit of a hot potato,” he continues. “It was more than they wanted to handle or could handle.” Initially, the school threw a lot of resources behind it, folding it into a formal teaching program. The French university had first developed it as a way for computer science students to practice their coding in a safe environment. In an era before Netflix and YouTube, users had few choices when it came to media software, and none of them were terribly good.īut by the late aughts, VLC was facing a terminal diagnosis. That release extended VLC’s reach beyond École Centrale as the software was adopted by the wider public. Though first developed in 1996, VLC was a breath of fresh air when it was released in 2001 under a GNU General Public license: It was customizable and high-powered, and, above all, it worked.
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There was Windows Media Player, a janky and underpowered program sufficient for entry-level users, as well as monstrosities like RealPlayer, which locked users into odd codecs and file formats. In an era before Netflix and YouTube, users had few choices when it came to media software, and none of them were terribly good. Even before the nonprofit began tracking downloads, it was clear that VLC was a runaway success.
Since February 2005, it’s been downloaded 3 billion times, according to VideoLAN. As the person overseeing the project and its team, he sets the tone for VLC as a whole. (VideoLAN Client, the original name for the project, is where VLC gets its name.) On the surface, he’s laid-back, casual, and frank, though that belies a steely determination. Kempf-now the president of VLC’s parent organization, the nonprofit VideoLAN-is the person who helped guide VLC’s journey from student project to ubiquitous software.
To students, the project was known as “Network 2000.” To the rest of the world, it was VLC media player. It included an unusual project: student-run open-source software that had been running on a couple of university servers for seven years. When Jean-Baptiste Kempf joined École Centrale Paris as a student in 2003, he was tasked with helping run the university’s computer network.
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