VLC Media Player App for Windows 8.1, 10 is Here [Review]
After a long journey, waiting times and the certification process that was needed as part of the official release, VLC is officially here. Read below for more on it, as well as a video overview of its features.
At the very beginning of 2013, VideoLAN already had all the money it needed to continue the development of the official VLC app for Windows 8, as its Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign had even exceeded the goals it has set. But the way it is finally over, and VLC for Windows 8 is here. We’re taking it for a ready and you can see how it looks like in the video from below before downloading it (link at the end of the article).
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Your favorite media player now in the Windows Store
VLC for Windows 8 is an experimental port of VLC media player for the WinRT platform. VLC media player is an open source application that plays all multimedia file formats, from files, streams and discs on all platform. This application will play most video file formats, including Ogg, FLAC and MKV.
VLC for Windows 8 is currently in Beta and when you will first enter the application, you will see this mentioned inside the app itself, so bugs and other glitches are to be expected. This means often updates will make their way on the official changelog, and we’ll be here to timely report on that, as well. By using the official VLC app for Windows 8, you can virtually play every kind of video, even Ogg, FLAC and MKV.
As you will see in the video from below, the app comes with the following sections: Home, Videos, Music, External Storage and Media Servers. The ‘Last Viewed’ will display the latest videos and tracks that you have played. However, currently you aren’t able to add music files to the VLC media player, as only the “open video” command will be available. I’ve tried with various audio formats, but no good. I guess that will get included in the future.
When playing a video, you can increase and decrease its playback speeds, go to the next available file and also add the subtitle file. You can choose to disable the soundtrack of a movie or change its tracks, if there are some. Another early bug that I discovered occurred when adding a new video file while already playing one. The newly added file would wrongly inherit the name of the previous video file, as you can see in the short overview of the app for yourself. This is a minor bug and I’m sure it will get fixed.
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The application is official in version 0.2.0 and will work for Windows 8 users, as well, because VideoLAN cited the fact that there are many who still haven’t made the jump to Windows 8.1. The app also won’t work on Windows RT devices, as it has been compiled for x86 and x64 devices. Again, this is another feature which will get added with a future release.
VLC for Windows 8 supports the same codecs as the VLC application for desktop, from MPEG-1 to H.265, through WMV3 and VC-1; it also supports multiple-audio tracks selection, embedded subtitles, background audio playback, Live Tiles, removable storage and DLNA servers, as you have seen in the above video. Besides the glitches that I have observed, VideoLAN also says that the app is currently slow, subtitles support is not very good and there are some issues with audio. Nonetheless, it performs the basic jobs quite well, so go ahead and download it from the Windows Store by following the link from below.
Download VLC app for Windows 8, Windows 8.1
