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VLC surpasses five billion downloads, preps Vision Pro app

Open source video player VLC surpassed five billion downloads across desktop and mobile platforms in recent days, and Videolan president Jean-Baptiste Kempf told me that the project is anything but done: In addition to continued work on VLC 4.0, the Videolan team is also in the process of porting VLC to Apple’s Vision Pro headset. Kempf said that VLC may even add FAST channels in the future.

VLC launched 23 years ago as a student project, and has since become one of the most popular open source apps of all time. The app surpassed three billion downloads in early 2019; interest in it remains strong, despite the growth streaming services like Netflix have seen in recent years. The latest version of VLC, which was released in November, has already been downloaded more than 335 million times by desktop users alone.