Published at LXer:

VLC is unique among Windows players in that it doesn't require installed codecs and drivers to play back media content. Why this approach? VLC originates in the Unix/Linux world where there's no such a thing as Windows codecs. It has been designed to use built-in decoding algorithms from the beginning. Some of the codecs were also developed within the VideoLAN project (e.g. libmpeg2), but most of the codecs are now coming from FFMPEG or other external open source libraries. VLC is cross platform, of course. What does it take to enable that support? We use the same Unix-centric build-system for all platforms. Support for Windows is very time-consuming of its own. Nowadays, we use BuildBot (http://buildbot.sourceforge.net) to automatically test and detect build failures on different platforms.

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