VLC is an incredibly popular cross-platform media player, and it’s well known for supporting a wide variety of media types. iPhone and iPod Touch users can rejoice because a public version of VLC4iPhone is right around the corner! Work has already begun on porting the popular VLC media player over to Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, and the progress looks great.
Note: VLC4iPhone is currently in semi-private Beta testing. You can join in the Beta if you donate to the cause.
The screenshot to the right is compliments of iPhoneFreakz, and as you can tell the player fits in well with the standard iPhone interface. The best part is that it already supports a wide range of media formats including MPEG/MPG, MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, MP3, XviD, h264, FLAC, 3GP, and more! Think of all the headaches this can save since you won’t have to convert your videos in order to watch them on your phone.
It’s quite awesome that a developer has undertaken a project like this, and I wonder what kind of media players are going to emerge once the official App Store has launched. In the mean time you’ll need to have a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch if you want to dabble with VLC4iPhone, plus you’ll have to donate to the project as we mentioned earlier.
VLC4iPhone [via Gizmodo]
I’ve actually been testing this for about a week now (since the first release) and as good as it may seem, it still needs some work. There are bugs that people have reported such as:
-can’t remove files from playlists
-no video
-no audio
and when the video does play and sound does work, then on top of that the framerates are pretty bad. It’s really laggy. Zod said he doesn’t know what’s causing it yet (but he has a few ideas) so further testing and development will probably fix the issues.
The app is great for its first stages (there were only 3 releases if I’m not mistaken) but it could be a lot better.
I thought I saw you in the forum there.
I’m sure it will continue to get as time goes on, but things are looking pretty good considering it’s only been out for a week.