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But over two decades later, many great alternatives emerged, while VLC didn’t receive any groundbreaking updates. VLC became an instant hit because it could play many of the formats most players didn’t support back then, including WMV, FLAC, and others. As VLC player got more and more recognition and became popular worldwide, the original developers released the code under the open-source license, so that anyone could fix bugs and contribute new features. Back then, they called it VideoLAN Client (VLC for short). The official story of VLC player goes back to 1996, when a few students of École Centrale Paris in France developed the app as their academic project. What’s not to love, right? Well, there are a couple of problems. The app is free, has good ratings, and seems to be universally loved.
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From the first moments of looking for a better media player, VLC for Mac is going to show up in search results again and again.
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