Germany paid to keep VLC on Windows XP

The VLC download page is an orange button and a cone. "VLC media player." A donate field for €4. On a Linux client today the button reads Version 3.0.23. The counter under it sat at 362,983,325. Read only that, and the job looks like a free Windows Media Player with better manners.

The fourth checkmark is colder than the hero video. Their line, not ours:

Completely Free - no spyware, no ads and no user tracking.

— videolan.org/vlc

The player has to parse whatever you drop on it. Files. Streams. A subtitle from a forum in 2009. That is the product. The codecs are in the binary so you do not hunt for a pack. The association asks for four euros so the servers stay up.

Paris, an association that cannot pay itself

VideoLAN sits at 18 rue Charcot, 75013 Paris. The legal page calls it an association loi 1901: volunteers, no profit split to the board, French law. Jean-Baptiste Kempf is president. The project started as a student streamer at École Centrale Paris in 1996, went open source in 2001, and left the school in 2009. EuroMakers files the listing under Entertainment because you play files with it. The organisation is not a studio. The contact page says they do not offer jobs, and the phone is not for support.

They will take a DVD that fails to play, if you post it to Paris. They will take a SEPA debit. They will not take a support ticket disguised as a donation.

The grant is the version you still download

Here is the claim a directory card cannot give you. VLC 3.0 shipped in February 2018. In January 2026 they published 3.0.23, the twenty-fourth update of that branch. The official release page lists codec work, Windows ARM64 with a floor of Windows 10 1809, dark mode on Windows and Linux, and this line:

Maintenance supported by a generous sponsorship of Sovereign Tech Fund

— videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.23.html

The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German public programme. It pays for open-source infrastructure, not for a new skin. The same notes still list Windows XP as a supported OS, through Windows 11. ARM64 is a new SKU. XP is an old one they refused to drop.

Kempf published the XP note in January. Support had quietly broken. They repaired it in 3.0.22. His line:

Plenty of kiosks, industrial machines and forgotten family PCs still run XP, and those are exactly the machines that will never see an OS patch again.

— Jean-Baptiste Kempf, jbkempf.com, 14 January 2026

A maintained player is some of the only current software those boxes will get. People mock the matrix. The matrix is the point.

Who should not install it

Use something else if you want a streaming catalogue with a login, a vendor who picks up the phone, or VLC 4.0 as the file you download today. VLC will still open the MKV. It will not be Netflix.

• You want a storefront of licensed streams and a search box. Wrong product.
• You need Widevine, FairPlay, or a player that refuses a DVD. libdvdcss exists for a reason, and French law treats that as interoperability.
• You thought the orange button was 4.0. It is 3.0.23.
• You need a sales engineer. The contact page says the number is strictly not for user support.
• You wanted XP in the matrix as nostalgia. They shipped it as a supported OS, next to Xbox and Android 4.2.
• You will not accept a GPL binary from a volunteer association that takes Stripe donations. That is the whole company.

If you want codecs in the binary, a parser that still gets security work, and a player whose Windows XP line is a German grant rather than a punchline — start with the listing, then read the 3.0.23 notes. The homepage will show you an orange button. The notes will show you who paid for the old machines.

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