VLC media player for Android now available

The VideoLAN Project has finally published a VLC for Android to the Google Play Store. The player right now in beta brings most of the famed features of VLC to Android in a native UI in the Android 4.0 Holo style. It is a big news for movie buffs using Android (like me) which means, no more headache of converting a movie to a supported codec before it can play on the phone. It plays all files, in all formats, like the classic VLC on Windows.

The beta published to the Google Play Store today is only compatible with ARM systems that use the ARMv7 architecture set and support the NEON instruction set. That means that there are several devices — mostly those released before Google/HTC Nexus One in 2010 — that cannot run the current beta. The major exception here is the Nvidia Tegra platform. Nvidia’s Tegra 2 lacks NEON instruction set as a result cannot run VLC currently.

The NEON instruction set is general-purpose SIMD engine efficiently processes current and future multimedia formats, enhancing the user experience. SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) instructions are also referred to as vector math instructions, which provide hardware support for processing parallel data sets. These instructions are often used for vector manipulation, which is critical for dealing with multi-dimensional data such as 3D polygons for graphics. NEON technology can accelerate multimedia and signal processing algorithms such as video encode/decode, 2D/3D graphics, gaming, audio and speech processing, image processing, telephony, and sound synthesis by at least 3x the performance of ARMv5 and at least 2x the performance of ARMv6 SIMD.  It can be called the equivalent to Intel’s SSE instructions. ARM claims NEON give 60-150% performance boost on complex video codecs 

The NEON instruction set is supported in Samsung Exynos, TI OMAP 4 and 5, Qualcomm Snapdragon S2, S3, and S4 chips. Nvidia Tegra 2 is also ARMv7, but there’s no NEON instruction support unlike Tegra 3. 

A non-NEON version of VLC will become available on the Play Store, as well as a version for ARMv6 processors. Until, then you can get VLC non-NEON apk from here. The VideoLAN nightly build server has builds for ARMv6, ARMv7 with NEON, and Tegra 2.

VLC currently supports all versions of Android, all the way from from version 2.1 (Éclair). It plays all files, in all formats, like the classic VLC, supports Subtitles , embedded and external, including ASS and DVD subtitles, Multi audio or subtitles tracks selection, Support for network streams, including HLS, udio and video media library, with full search. 


Here is a software performance on Phones for H.264 codec.

VLC officially recommends these phones for optimal experience

• Galaxy Nexus; (OMAP 4460)
• HTC One X; (Tegra 3)
• Samsung Galaxy S3; (Exynos 4 Quad)
• Motorola Defy; (OMAP 3610)
• HTC Desire; (QSD8250 Snapdragon)
• Nexus one. (QSD8250 Snapdragon)

However, if you live in the United States or Canada, you will not be able to get the VLC beta from the Play Store. VLC is available globally through the Play Store except for North America. The VLC team explains that they do not have access to North America-specific Android devices to test the builds with. If you live in North America and wish to use VLC for Android, you can grab it from the VideoLAN nightly build server. For, rest of the world, head to the Play Store to get the VLC for Android now. 

Note that the beta is in early testing, and VideoLAN claims it is rather slow right now due to all the debugging options enabled and the UI is unfinished and will likely be drastically different in the final version. But I have been using it since the alpha version on my Xperia Mini Pro using both (Gingerbread 2.3.4 and ICS) and didn't encounter any critical bugs till now. It plays up-to 720p videos on my Mini Pro flawlessly. 


However, if you do encounter a bug do report it on their official forum.

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