Videolan Technologies Inc (fka VLNT)

[VPbanker]

UNFORTUNATELY these two organizations are complete separate entities providing separate products- see my technical summaries below. I'm still reviewing the patents but it's going to take some time, I'll try and lay them out in terms everyone can understand.

"Our" Videolan
-Summary-
End to end solution for managing, distributing and efficiently providing high speed video and voice within a small (corporate campus-LAN) or large (nationwide corporate enterprise-WAN)

More detail-
Our Videolan specializes in the following:
Proprietary systems, architecture, network protocols and configurations, hardware and software patents specifically focused on LAN(Local Area Network) / WAN (Wide Area Network) teleconferencing, visual communications and information distribution solutions based upon its Metallic Fiber(TM) transmission and broadband switching technology. VideoLan's technology enabled broadcast-quality transport of high-speed, bi-directional, real-time voice, data and video over existing twisted pair copper wire infrastructures. The Visual Xchange System (VXS) (which is trademarked by Videolan) family of products allows users to visually communicate, share data and have universal access to video resources from a desktop PC (think IM chat with video)


THEIR VideoLAN (Apple affiliation)
-summary-
A group of college students who created an 'open source' (i.e. free) media player [much like windows media player but modified for use on a TV]

Here's more information on their "product"

http://www.videolan.org/support/index.html

The VideoLAN project was started as a school project in 1996 by students of Ecole Centrale Paris, a French engineering school. These students wanted to be able to watch television on their PCs. (They also wanted to upgrade the VIA Centrale Réseaux network so they needed a bandwidth intensive application to justify the upgrade.)

They began writing VLS (VideoLAN Server) and the VLC (VideoLAN Client) to stream and read MPEG2 streams. They succeeded in serving and reading the first stream in 1998. These two programs were planned to be modular, which meant a core consisting basically of communication functions to be used by the modules. This allowed easy porting of the OS specific modules.

In 2001, after many months (if not years) of negotiation, the school's Director agreed to a change to the GPL licence. Developers from all around the world started working on the project right away. One of them (gibalou) even submitted the Win32 port 6 months later!

The first large scale multicast streaming tests occurred in May 2002. 500 students on the VIA Centrale Réseaux network were able to participate in these tests. In January 2003, the first MPEG4 streams were tested and realtime MPEG4 encoding was available two months later.

Hopefully this helps everyone understand the difference

~VP