VLC 's Beta For Android Is Ready — Unless You're North American 118
MrSeb writes "The VideoLAN Project has pushed a beta version of VLC for Android to the Google Play Store. The beta brings most of the functionality of VLC for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X to Android in a native UI in the Android 4.0 Holo style. However, there are a few hitches. The beta release published to the Google Play Store today is only compatible with ARM systems that use the ARMv7 architecture set and support the NEON instruction set. That means that there are several devices — mostly those released before the Samsung Galaxy S in late 2010, and anything powered by Tegra 2 — that cannot run the current beta. Also, apparently due to a lack of North America-specific Android test devices, VLC for Android is currently not available from the US or Canadian Play Store. Both problems should be rectified soon, though." VLC is one of those impressive programs that just works with nearly any input thrown at it, and one of the first things I put on any computer. I hope the Android version retains pitch-controlled variable-speed playback, perhaps my favorite VLC feature, and something I miss on my tablet.
for people in north america (Score:5, Informative)
for people in north America just grab it off of their nightly build site. thats what i did yesterday
You can still get it and it works... (Score:5, Informative)
You can always download it from the Nighties
http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/android-v7-neon/VLC-debug.apk [videolan.org]
or for Tegra 2:
http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/android-v7-tegra2/VLC-debug.apk [videolan.org]
Plays all files, in all formats, like the classic VLC.
Audio and video media library, with full search.
Support for network streams, including HLS.
Supports Android from version 2.1 (platform-7).
Supports ARMv6, ARMv7 and ARMv7+NEON.
Subtitles support, embedded and external, including ASS and DVD subtitles.
Multi audio or subtitles tracks selection.
Multi-core decoding, for Cortex-A7 A9 and A15 chips.
Experimental hardware decoding.
Gestures, headphones control.
I sincerely doubt its due to an unavailability of US/Canadian test devices because late model GSM HSPA/UMTS devices from all the major manufacturers are pretty much the same world wide. I actually prefer buying unlocked international versions of these devices rather than carrier models.
I suspect this is really another patent fight over Codecs used or worked around by VLC, and the Google Market (play store) is making sure they don't end up on the wrong side of the MPAA, (not to mention trying to keep Google's YOUTube ox from being gored.
It does work, but won't necessarily play everything the desktop version plays just yet. The software decoding is slow and jerky for videos recorded on the android device it self, and the sound is out of sync, where as the embedded video player, or the desktop version works perfectly playing the same files.
It has a hard time of finding media on External_SD or attached USB storage on some tablets.
Still its a beta. And its nice to see progress,
Re:tegra 2 (Score:5, Informative)
I remember when the tegra 2 was hot shit.
Meh.
I remember when the AMD 386DX40 was considered to be wickedly fast, except for the Motorolla 68xxx line in the Macs. Now, my router has a more powerful CPU that runs on just 100 milliamps, 5 volts. Although the i7 is today's "wickedly fast" x86 processor, I don't remember really giving all that much of a damned about it. The marketplace has matured, and nobody really cares all that much any more.
Did you get a Core2, i5, or AMD CPU? Would you notice if you had? Chances are that you wouldn't notice the difference. Because it does the job well and reliably, I'm still using a 10 year old Pentium 3 server as a network monitor!
But phones are different. It's still new technology, needed features are still being implemented, tested, and improved on. My 2 year old Droid2 phone is already so obsolete that when I went to exchange it because of a defect, Verizon decided to replace it with an entirely new model!
Re:What for (Score:2, Informative)
What do I do with this?
You play audio and video files with it.
Re:Hardware acceleration? (Score:4, Informative)
You're not gonna get hardware acceleration any better than what the device manufacturer supplies via their include 'video' app.
Getting access to those HW accelerated video decoders is very black box in nature. Notice how the article mentions requiring the NEON instruction set. VLC must be using the simd instruction set called NEON to do the decoding.
Surprisingly, you can achieve a good amount of performance by using NEON in your code (I've used it myself).
Re:Where's the Slow/Fast speed buttons? (Score:3, Informative)