VLC for Windows

Yesterday after a very long gestation period the Windows Store version of the versatile video player VLC was released. The desktop version plays just about any format you can throw at it but what about the Windows version? I thought I would try the app out and try some of the common files I have on my external driver and of course I had to try Windows Media Center recorded TV files. I tested the files on my Toshiba Encore 8 low costs Windows tablet (see my review) which is a great device but isn’t exactly a power house.

Formats:

Window Media Center Recorded TV (Without DRM) – I copied over a file I recorded on my Media Center machine (DVB-T) and then played it with Windows with VLC, my tablet doesn’t have Windows Media Center installed on but the file played fine with VLC for Windows. It should also play DVB-S,DVB-T2 and other Media Center formats.

The other format I have had trouble with on Windows in the past is MKV files. I have tried a few Windows Store video apps and some will play MKV files by transcoding them first (PressPlay) or some you have to pay for like PowerDVD but VLC plays them out of the box and it works really well. MPEG4 files, MPEG2, H.265, WMV3 and are VC-1 are also supported.

UI

The app has makes great use of the modern UI styles and fortunately it doesn’t look like a straight port of their other mobile apps or the desktop app, it looks like a modern windows apps. It has a home section which shows recently played content, a section for videos, a section for music, an external storage section and an area for media servers (DLNA).

There doesn’t seem to be a way of telling the app where your content is stored, I think it’s looking at the standard Windows Music and Videos folder but it didn’t take long for it to find my music on the SD card (which I have already added to the Windows music library).

The music section presents your content by Artist, Tracks or favourite albums. There seems to be some metadata support, when you view an album you get a biography of the artist. You can add an album or song to your favourite lists but there doesn’t seem to be any kind of support for playlists. As a music player VLC for Windows works pretty well, it could do with more features like Playlist support but it certainly is a nice looking ui plus background playback is also supported.

For videos you get a thumbnail view of your content and when playing a video you can increase or decrease the playback speed. Like the music player the video side of things is a little basic, there is no way or organise your video content but it will play almost any format. You can also stream from a DLNA server, I haven’t actually got this working yet. I can get it to see my server but not actually play yet.

There are another couple of nice features, you can open a video file directly with a file browser so it doesn’t have to be in your music/videos collection and you can search by artists, track or video name.

So VLC is a great little app to have on your Windows device, at the moment it’s only for the Intel version of Windows so you can’t install it on a Surface 2 which is a shame as this is where the app is needed the most. On an Intel powered you could install the desktop version but an ARM tablet you can’t so hopefully it won’t take to long for the VLC team to get the app running on ARM platforms. There are also some limitations like no hardware acceleration and no playlists but I am sure these are items the developers can work on. If you have Windows 8/8.1 it’s an app well worth adding to your collection.

You can find the free app in the Windows Store.

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