videolan

Four 'videolan' stories July 2013 - February 2015

VLC for iOS back in the App Store for some/upgraders, should be available to all shortly

Ben Lovejoy Feb 16 2015 - 4:20 am PT

vlc

The VLC for iOS app–a favorite media player for many–has returned to the App Store in some countries and is expected to be available for all shortly. Some existing US users (us included!) are also reporting on Reddit being able to update to the latest version (2.4.1) if they have the previous version from before it was removed.

The app has something of a checkered history in the App Store, first removed from the store way back in 2011 after a licensing dispute; the original open-source developers claiming that the App Store terms were incompatible with the GNU Public License for the code. The app finally returned in 2013 before disappearing once more last September …
Expand
Expanding
Close

Major update to VLC for Mac adds 4K support, improved MKV support, interface improvements and more

Benjamin Mayo Sep 26 2013 - 5:57 am PT

8 Comments

VideoLAN has released version 2.1 of its popular open source video player, VLC. The update — codenamed “Ricewind” — brings new audio processing to the app, to improve both processing performance and audio fidelity. There is full support for surround sound outputs in addition to new effects and many new supported metadata formats for audio.

On the video side, the app has ported the OpenGL output to OpenGL ES, making ports to iOS and Android much easier. Notably, VideoLAN says that VLC is now ready for Ultra-HD content (otherwise known as 4K). The app update has also focused heavily on improving MKV compatibility, including better seek performance and subtitle metadata support.

Expand
Expanding
Close

VLC for iOS updated with improved international support, FTP server discovery

Mark Gurman Sep 6 2013 - 7:20 pm PT

0 Comments

VideoLAN’s VLC application for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch has been updated with some significant enhancements. Notably, the version 2.1 release includes improved international support. This includes subtitle options for non-western languages, and localization to the following languages: Bosnian, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Marathi, Portuguese, Slovenian.

Improvements are present for subtitles, VoiceOver, Accessibility, video output, and password locking.

In terms of new features, audio-only playback is now supported. Additionally, FTP server discovery for streaming and downloading, UPNP network compatibility, and improved Bonjour featured are present in the update.

VideoLAN tells us that the launch version had 2.5 million downloads during the first week of availability. The update is available for free on the App Store.

Expand
Expanding
Close

VLC returns to the App Store after two year hiatus

Scott Buscemi Jul 18 2013 - 10:16 am PT

0 Comments

largeVLC

After a nasty licensing issue that broke out in 2011, VLC was removed from the App Store. Today, the media player is destined to make a comeback, complete with new features like WiFi content uploading, which makes it even easier for you to get content from your desktop to the app on your iOS device.

In some sense, this app may be too little too late, as the trend toward video streaming has increased tremendously over the past few years. Going through all of the effort to transfer your videos from your computer to phone/tablet may not be worth it. However, users who are going to be without an internet connection for some time – or those with low data caps – will find the new VLC app quite useful.

From our own Benjamin Mayo:

Although I greatly appreciate the engineering effort necessary to make the decoding process multithreaded, a big boon for multicore iOS devices, the app’s UI still leaves much to be desired.

Expect the app to appear in the App Store shortly.

Update: It’s out now.