VLC 1.0 For Android Finally Loses The Beta Tag

When touchscreen smartphones began playing a bigger role in video-watching activities, VideoLAN had to start embracing the mobile world as well and port its apps to the popular mobile platforms. Even though there were already good alternatives to VLC, such as the free (but ad-based) MX Player, VLC tends to have better codec and format support than most players out there, offering MKV, MP4, AVI, Ogg, MOV, FLAC ,TS, M2TS and AAC. It's also open source and free.

Today, we got the news that VLC 1.0 has finally been released as stable, losing the beta tag. VLC will continue to keep a beta branch for the braver users who want to get all the latest updates first and help the group behind the open source organization, VideoLAN, to discover and fix the bugs in the new versions.

Despite being an open source app, VLC was first launched for iOS rather than Android (the open source OS out of the two), presumably because it was easier to port most of the source code from the desktop version. The iOS mobile operating system was also more popular than Android at the time, so the group may have simply tried to answer to the platform that had the biggest demand.

Unfortunately for VideoLAN and the iOS users waiting for the app, Apple rejected VLC from the iTunes App Store. Apparently, there was a conflict between VLC's GPL open source license, which is incompatible with any sort of DRM-like restrictions, and Apple's mandatory DRM for all iOS apps.

After the rejection, VideoLAN switched its focus to the Android platform and has been in the process of porting and optimizing its application to all Android devices for the past couple of years.

From the changelog in the Play Store is the following statement:

"This release fixes ARMv8 processors, Android 5.0 crashes and minor improvements. The 0.9.x series is major release with hardware decoding and a new interface available in dark or white colors. It integrates DVD iso and menu support, an equalizer, playlist management, Widi [sic] screens support and updated SD cards detection. Hardware acceleration is now enabled by default on 4.3+ and has better subtitles support. Software decoding has been accelerated too."

VLC 1.0 for Android can be downloaded from the Play Store now.

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Lucian Armasu
Lucian Armasu is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He covers software news and the issues surrounding privacy and security.
  • Patrick Tobin
    Link doesn't point to anything :(
    Reply
  • ern88
    So, can you stream to your Chromecast with it????
    Reply
  • ern88
    So, can you stream to your Chromecast with it????
    Reply
  • ern88
    So, can you stream to your Chromecast with it????
    Reply
  • ern88
    Sorry, using a work PC and it must of tripple post!!!!
    Reply
  • IInuyasha74
    Its about time. I was starting think VLC was never going to get a good release on Android. I never got why the development for mobile devices was so poor. I know its an open-source program and not a paid group working on it but I still thoguht someone would of wanted to do more with it.
    Reply
  • Happhazzard
    Nothing about this on VLC's news page:
    http://www.videolan.org/news.html

    Nothing on their Android Download Page:
    http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-android.html

    Nothing on in the Google Play store or Amazon App Store.

    So have they pulled it or did the author jump the gun?
    Reply
  • fkr
    android police and android central also reported this but the listing has been removed as of now.
    Reply
  • alextheblue
    They're also working on a touch-centric port for Windows Modern platforms (8.x, 10, WP, possibly Xbox One). It's currently in beta for x86 Windows with more to come. No licensing issues with Windows or Android. Sorry iOS users... tell Apple you want them to loosen their restrictions!
    Reply
  • rdc85
    Maybe something is broken that forced them to rollback the app..

    As other said I'm cannot find anything on official site or playstore right now
    Reply