Version 3.0 was in development for Windows, Linux and macOS since June 2016 and released in February 2018. As of 2016 VLC is the third in the overall download count, and there have been more than 3 billion downloads. Support for Windows RT, Windows Phone and Xbox One were added later. The version for the Windows Store was released on March 13, 2014. Version 2.0.0 of VLC media player was released on February 18, 2012.

In July 2013 the VLC application could be resubmitted to the iOS App Store under the MPL-2.0. Subsequently, in October 2011 the VLC authors began to relicense the engine parts of VLC from the GPL-2.0-or-later to the LGPL-2.1-or-later to achieve better license compatibility, for instance with the Apple App Store. In January 2011, after VLC developer Rémi Denis-Courmont's complaint to Apple about the licensing conflict between the VLC's GPLv2 and the App store's policies, the VLC had been withdrawn from the Apple App Store by Apple. In September 2010, a company named 'Applidium' developed a VLC port for iOS under GPLv2 with the endorsement of the VLC project, which was accepted by Apple for their App Store. Work began on VLC for Android in 2010 and it has been available for Android devices on the Google Play store since 2011. After 13 years of development, version 1.0.0 of VLC media player was released on July 7, 2009. In 2007 the VLC project decided, for license compatibility reasons, not to upgrade to the just-released GPLv3. The cone icon design was changed from a hand drawn low resolution icon to a higher resolution CGI-rendered version in 2005, illustrated by Richard Øiestad. The cone icon used in VLC is a reference to the traffic cones collected by École Centrale's Networking Students' Association. The project name has been changed to VLC media player because there is no longer a client/server infrastructure. The functionality of the server-program, VideoLan Server (VLS), has mostly been subsumed into VLC and has been deprecated. 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. Originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris, it is now developed by contributors worldwide and is coordinated by VideoLAN, a non-profit organization.

It was intended to consist of a client and server to stream videos from satellite dishes across a campus network. Since VLC is no longer merely a client, that initialism no longer applies. VLC used to stand for 'VideoLAN Client' when VLC was a client of the VideoLAN project. The VideoLAN software originated as a French academic project in 1996. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux and macOS by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library however, this library is legally controversial and is not included in many software repositories of Linux distributions as a result. It also has its own protocol implementations. The libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project provides many of VLC's codecs, but the player mainly uses its own muxers and demuxers. The default distribution of VLC includes many free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins. It is able to stream media over computer networks and can transcode multimedia files. VLC supports many audio- and video-compression-methods and file-formats, including DVD-Video, Video CD, and streaming- protocols. VLC is also available on digital distribution platforms such as Apple's App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store. VLC is available for desktop operating systems and mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS and iPadOS. VLC media player (previously the VideoLAN Client and commonly known as simply VLC) is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. GPL-2.0-or-later with some libraries under LGPL-2.1-or-later VLC for iOS (MPLv2.0)

Windows, ReactOS, macOS, Linux, Android, ChromeOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, Xbox system software GUI: C++ (with Qt), Objective-C (with Cocoa), Swift, Java

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