VLC Comes to iPad, iPhone Version in the Works
The popular open source media player—VLC Media Player—has just hit the iTunes App Store for the iPad. The maker, Applidium, has also confirmed that an iPhone and iPod touch version are in the works but they decided to go with the iPad version first. The source code for the app is also available online already at videolan.org. The app is free of course.
So why get VLC on your iOS device? It plays the majority of video formats that Apple’s own media player in iOS does not. Right now the app has 3 ½ out of 5 stars on iTunes after 752 ratings. Not too bad, especially considering that this is the first version. I am a big fan of VLC on PCs so any VLC on iOS is good news.
A VLC based media player was rolling around on the jailbroken app store Cydia earlier this year, but it worked poorly, crashed a lot, had advertisements that displayed while watching videos and was later renamed to OpenStreamer (it still sucks).
The new app lets you upload videos to your iPad from iTunes for the app to play. Pretty nifty. However, 720p videos are running slowly right now. That is because of the lack of hardware acceleration for non-Apple supported formats in the iPad itself. I won’t claim that the app is perfect, but it seems to be running pretty well for most as long as non-720p videos are played. Besides, ha
ving more formats available means you don’t need to convert videos into another format just to get them into iOS.
Don’t expect to be playing FLV or RM formats yet, but AVI, MPG, DivX, MKV, etc. are working fine. Now all we need is a streaming system to bypass iTunes altogether. I doubt Apple would allow that though. But think, what if you could set up some media streaming on your PC and get all of your favorite videos onto VLC and your iOS device over the air via Wi-Fi or 3G from anywhere? Let’s keep dreaming for now. Maybe a jailbroken version of the app will allow that in the future. The source code is available online for any serious hackers to take a stab at…
Going to be installing this on your iPad? Giddy for it to hit the iPhone/iPod touch? Let me know.
Tags: Apple iPhone, iTunes App Store, apple ipad, media, Apple iPod touch
“But think, what if you could set up some media streaming on your PC and get all of your favorite videos onto VLC and your iOS device over the air via Wi-Fi or 3G from anywhere?”
Dude, you can use an app called ‘MLPlayer Lite’ for that! It operates on DLNA client so you can only access your media on wifi and you need to be streaming from another device (iMac for me) but works pretty well! Bigger videos like (2 hour long movies at big resolutions) take ages to load, but for a free app give it a go!
[Reply]
‘Air Video’ is what i think you are looking for. This enables you to stream any video stored on your computer via 3G and Wifi, converts it on the fly as well.
It’s excellent
[Reply]
umm plex anyone?
[Reply]
Yeah… “giddy!” I upload all the movies I download off the net to my iPhone and plug it into my TV to watch them. But I have to convert them all from avi to mpg. So if this let’s me skip the converting, it will be that much better.
[Reply]
Do you not count the Orb streamer for iOS – surely this is a ‘streaming system to bypass iTunes altogether’ and it does work over WiFi and 3G….
[Reply]