ZodTTD Bringing VLC Media Player to iPhone & Touch

by Eric March on June 25, 2008 at 8:51 pm

I have been holding off writing anything about this for a while because I have been waiting for compatibility and performance to reach a level where I think it’s getting closer to prime time. While it’s not there yet, it’s showing strong progress, so I figured I’d get the word out.

vlc4iphone is the work of our illustrious ZodTTD, and it is currently still in heavy beta testing, but I’ve had the opportunity to play with it for the past week and change, and while there’s still work to do, it is coming along very nicely.

The application is pretty huge by iPhone standards — currently weighing in at a heavy 24MB installed size (about 9mb download), so you’ll need to make sure you’ve got some free space before you install it. The bulk of its size however can be attributed to the absurd number of codecs it currently supports to varying degrees. Check it out:

- Video codec support for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Flash Video (FLV), DiVX, XViD, Quicktime (MOV), H.264, 3GP, and Windows Media (WMV - video only right now, but he’s working on audio).
- Audio codec support for the above video formats (except WMV right now) as well as MP3, Ogg, and FLAC.
- Streaming internet radio, including support for Shoutcast, M3U, MMS, RTSP and HTTP streams. Just feed it a URL and let it play!

Sorry. I should have told you to put on a bib before reading this.

As it stands right now compatibility and speed is still being heavily worked on. I’ve been testing numerous videos covering multiple audio and video codecs, containers, resolutions, bit rates, and frame rates, and the results with the latest beta have been extremely mixed, but are a vast improvement over the previous beta, so things look very promising for future versions.

There’s no word on a release date — like I said, this thing still needs work, but Zod is on the case, and I’m sure you all know by now that he does good work, so give it some time and hopefully we’ll finally have the last media player we’ll ever need on the iPhone and Touch.

As you’ll see in the gallery below, it currently only plays in portrait mode (speed considerations for now) but that is expected to change, as is the UI.  Hopefully, the ginormous ad block in the file list will also be trimmed to a more sensible level.

[Show as slideshow]

Posted in Application Related, In The Works