VLC for Windows RT

Last year we reported about VLC’s Kickstarter campaign to bring the great VLC app to the Windows Store. VLC is a great tool for playing just about any video format like MVK,DVDs and even Media Center TV files. While you can get a desktop version of the app you can’t get this working in Windows RT with a Windows Store version being the only way to get the app on devices like the Surface RT. Yesterday the VLC team updated the Kickstarter project with a progress report including screen shots. The team say it should ship “soon” and soon work on the Windows Phone version of VLC will start soon as well.

Here are some screen shots:

Technical update
If you followed closely, our main work, in addition to the UI, was to fight and replace the forbidden symbols not allowed on Windows App Store mode.

We’ve been quite efficient at that, working closely with Mingw-w64 project and GCCdevelopers.

The biggest result is that we have now cut down 90% of our symbols, that are forbidden on Metro Mode.

We mostly did this by:

  • replacing our forbidden calls with newer authorized equivalent calls,
  • modifying gcc and Mingw-w64,
  • writing new code in a special library of ours,
  • writing dummy functions,
  • disabling VLC code that would not work on the Metro platform,
  • moving VLC to MSVCRT 11.0, moving all the VLC codebase to UNICODE and WideChars to fit the new requirements.

We did also a lot of minor things to help the integration of libVLC and VLC in this modern platform.

What are we working on now:

We are now mainly working on 2 things:

  • make VLC work with MSVCRT 11.0 without crashing
  • write headers and C/C++ code to access the new fashion of COM APIs in which WinRT is written in.
What we are gonna work just after:
  • ARM, ARM, ARM.
  • WP8
Goodies

They are gonna get shipped soon

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