VLC for Windows 8 beta

VideoLAN has released the beta version of its media player VLC on Windows Store. Now, Windows 8 users won't need to leave the new Windows UI to use the player.


The application version 0.2.0:

• work on Windows 8.0 and 8.1: too many people are still on 8.0, so we had to use that. This decreases the stability of the application though.
• is compiled for Intel x86 CPUs: Windows RT version will follow as soon as we are able to compile it. ARM version will also apply to Windows Phone.
• plays all video and audio formats of VLC, including MKV, Ogg and Mov files or FLAC and MPC;
• supports the same codecs as the VLC application for desktop, from MPEG-1 to H.265, through WMV3 and VC-1;
• supports multiple-audio tracks selection;
• supports embedded subtitles;
• supports Background Audio playback;
• features a easy-to-navigate but complete UI, notably for audio browsing;
• supports Live Tiles!
• supports removable storage and DLNA servers.

Still, there are certain limitations that have been reported, such as

• This app is currently slow, and is slower than VLC for desktop for video decoding and has no hardware acceleration;
• Subtitles support is not very good yet, and notably it only supports embedded subtitles; this is our major point of focus for now.
• Audio does not seem to work in all configurations;
• Playlists and streams are not supported in the UI (they are present in the core)
• It's clearly not as stable as it should be.

VideoLAN's President Jean-Baptiste Kempf, has said that fixing bugs is the priority for his team right now. "After that, we need to rework the thumbnails management and a better integration with Windows; also, the app is too slow to start." he adds.
VLC for Windows 8 can be downloaded from here.
Source: Kickstarter