VLC Player For Android Is Almost a Reality

An anonymous reader writes "Android, as a platform, has always fallen a little short when it comes to media playback. The native apps that come with every Android device don't make it easy to watch movies. The only native app that allows you to navigate movies is the Gallery app, which is great for photos, but bad for movies. Among the many contributions to the Android ecosystem made by Austen Dicken are his developments in support of the Motorola Droid line of phones for Cyanogenmod, Embedded Gentoo for Android, and, as a fun side project, he's playing with VLC for Android. Austen describes his work on VLC for Android to be pre-alpha at this point in time, but he is still able to show some impressive results regarding basic functionality. "

Re:Accelerated WebM?

[EdZ]

Yes, there is hardware acceleration, but it depends on the chipset. The Tegra 2, for example, can play back h.264 1080p24 (/p30/i60) perfectly happily, but ONLY Main Profile. Throw CABAC and weighted p/b frames at it and it'll throw a wobbler, so no High Profile.

There are several existing free apps that provide a nice browsing interface and software decoding for any codecs not supported in hardware (usually pretty slow, think 480p30 max) and hardware decoding for unsupported containers (e.g. MKV. I think MoboPlayer can even handle Ordered Chapters). I can't see VLC doing anything different other than having the traffic cone logo and a hideous interface. And probably dodgy subtitle rendering.

Irrelevant

[SuperKendall]

VLC is GPL3. GPL3 is incompatible with the App Store due to the anti-Tivoisation provisions.

Regardless of that being true or not, it doesn't matter - because that is not how VLC was pulled from the app store. As stated. one of the VLC contributors had Apple pull it - Apple published it to the store just fine and it was up for a while.

Re:IOS + Handbrake

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Wrong.

VLC is GPL3. GPL3 is incompatible with the App Store due to the anti-Tivoisation provisions. On that basis, nobody has the right to publish an iOS App Store version without the consent of all contributors.

Wrong? That's so wrong it's right. Not only is VCL under GPL2, the VCL project has even spoken out against GPL3 http://www.videolan.org/press/2007-1.html [videolan.org] because of the Tivo clause - and the VCL engine is about to move to LGPL2.1 http://www.videolan.org/press/lgpl.html [videolan.org] to make it even more open.