VLC Media Player App for Windows 8 (Kickstarter Project)

[Arthur]

The VLC Team have started a Kickstarter project with a goal of raising £40,000 to develop a 'Metro' version of VLC Media Player. Even if you don't use (or like) Windows 8, I think it's still worth donating a pound or two.

 

Source: Kickstarter (via Neowin)

 

VideoLAN, makers of the very popular, free and open-source media player VLC, are looking for backing on Kickstarter to bring a native version of the app to Windows 8.

 

The app will allow users to play all kinds of files, just like the original VLC application, and it also supports the playback of DVDs, VCDs and unencrypted Blu-Rays. The company says all features from current releases will be retained in the Windows 8 version, including support for subtitles, video filters, and equalizer.

 

The money invested into the project will allow members of the VideoLAN team to work on VLC for Windows 8 full time, and it will also allow the company to hire professional designers to build it. The team hopes to release the app within three months after raising the money. The first release will run on x86-based devices, and support for ARM architecture will come in a subsequent release.

 

http://i.imgur.com/JltyF.jpg

 

http://i.imgur.com/hsCkM.png

[RabbieBurns]

Congratulations!

 

You are now an official backer of VLC for the new Windows 8 User Experience ("Metro"). Time to tell the world about it!

 

Hopefully others will follow suit.

[CyberNerd]

Hopefully others will follow suit.

 

TIFKAM doesn't appear overly popular with developers.

 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/378562/hit-game-makes-52-in-first-week-on-windows-rt

Edited December 9, 2012 by CyberNerd

[Arthur]

TIFKAM doesn't appear overly popular with developers.

Why on earth did Rubicon make the game ARM-only since this means none of the 40 million+ Windows 8 users can buy it! That's just dumb.

 

Also, what has this got to do with TIFKAM? Once you are in the game you only see the game?

Edited December 9, 2012 by Arthur

[sted]

TIFKAM doesn't appear overly popular with developers.

 

Great Big War Game makes £52 in first week on Windows 8 Store | News | PC Pro

 

So on a format thats what a month old thet sell less than ios or android that has been on tabs or phone for years. There cant be that many rt devices out there

[CyberNerd]

So on a format thats what a month old thet sell less than ios or android that has been on tabs or phone for years. There cant be that many rt devices out there

 

Indeed, sales have flopped. From the article it does sound like MS are putting resources into supporting developers now - but £50 on the first week of sales for a major application is undoubtedly going to be a signal to other developers that windows isn't the platform of choice that it once was.

[CyberNerd]

Why on earth did Rubicon make the game ARM-only since this means none of the 40 million+ Windows 8 users can buy it! That's just dumb.

 

Also, what has this got to do with TIFKAM? Once you are in the game you only see the game?

 

I guess because RT platforms are ARM only? And they are the only sensibly priced windows tablets. I was under the impression that RT had to be TIFKAM but I may be wrong.

[Arthur]

sales have flopped.

Have they?

 

From the article it does sound like MS are putting resources into supporting developers now

Microsoft have been helping (or offering to help) developers for a while now. Remember Minecraft?

 

£50 on the first week of sales for a major application is undoubtedly going to be a signal to other developers that Windows isn't the platform of choice that it once was.

No. It just means developers should release apps and games that are compatible with both Windows 8 and Windows RT. It would be like creating an Android game that only runs on the Nexus 4 and wondering why you aren't selling many copies. Common sense really.

 

You can't expect to sell tens of millions of tablets from day one - it takes time.

 

I guess because RT platforms are ARM only? / I was under the impression that RT had to be TIFKAM but I may be wrong.

RT is ARM-only, but I think you are getting TIFKAM/Metro and Windows RT mixed up? It's certainly possible to create apps which don't use or follow the Metro UI/UX guidelines (Google Chrome is a good example, although that isn't available on RT). Games typically don't need to use the Metro UI because they almost always run full-screen (as shown below).

 

http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC573448.png

 

Windows RT does have a desktop (like Windows 8 does), although you can only buy apps from the Windows Store.

 

http://i.imgur.com/rX5Ds.jpg

[CyberNerd]

Have they?

 

 

Yes - Nexus7 is selling at 1million a month, and that's just one device in a plethora of android tablets.The ipad mini sold something like 3million units in the first week. RT i doing very badly in comparison.

 

RT is ARM-only, but I think you are getting TIFKAM/Metro and Windows RT mixed up?

 

yes I am getting confused. My understanding now is that VLC want cash to make a TIFKAM version, that isn't ARM based. ARM applications should be metro based but don't have to be. traditional windows apps do run on windows 8, but it depends on which version of windows. Metro is the future so developers are encouraged to port apps to it and make their money back by re-selling them for the new interface.

It's certainly getting much more complicated that "runs on PC or mac" these days.

[RabbieBurns]

yes I am getting confused. My understanding now is that VLC want cash to make a TIFKAM version, that isn't ARM based. ARM applications should be metro based but don't have to be. traditional windows apps do run on windows 8, but it depends on which version of windows. Metro is the future so developers are encouraged to port apps to it and make their money back by re-selling them for the new interface.

It's certainly getting much more complicated that "runs on PC or mac" these days.

 

I think ARM apps are all Metro based, but RT also has a desktop 'app'

VLC is making a metro app for x86 and RT will follow after according to the blurb i read earlier

 

I happily use VLC desktop mode on my laptop, but on my tablet pc a metro app would be useful.

[Arthur]

Nexus 7 is selling at 1 million a month, and that's just one device in a plethora of Android tablets. The iPad mini sold something like 3 million units in the first week.

You have to remember that Windows RT tablets are very new. Motorola's Xoom tablet was one of the first proper Android tablets available and that didn't sell particularly well (only 440,000 in the first three months and then 100-200,000 per quarter after that). Samsung also sold around 242,000 Galaxy Tab's per month. Based on those figures, Microsoft is off to a good start.

 

HTC's first Android tablet (the Flyer) sold so well they discontinued it seven months later and haven't made another tablet since.

 

The Nexus 7 on the other hand is selling well because it's pretty much the best 7" Android tablet currently available. The hardware and software are well designed, it has great specs, it's cheap, it doesn't come with any of the "added extras" you get with other manufacturers tablets and is heavily advertised on both TV and Google's homepage. There is also lot of demand for a decent Android tablet that is properly supported by the company that makes it.

 

The iPad mini is different because that is one tablet sold by a single company. Until recently, if you wanted an iPad your only choices were the £399-£659 9.7" Retina iPad or the £329-£429 iPad 2 (also 9.7"). Understandably there are lots of people who want a cheaper, smaller and lighter iPad, so it is not surprising Apple had sold lots of iPad mini's. Apple also have most of the mindshare when it comes to tablets and they are sold in manys more places all over the world. To most people, all tablets are called iPad's.

Edited December 9, 2012 by Arthur

[plexer]

Better off backing this http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shota/tailly-the-tail-that-wags-when-you-get-excited?ref=category lol.

 

Ben

[RabbieBurns]

Dear backers,

Over the last few days, we achieved the following progress:

The first important news is that a port of VLC to Windows Phone 8 appears to be easier than expected. While the roadmap is about Windows 8 for Intel followed by a version for Windows RT, it appears to be feasible to publish another version with a specific interface for Windows Phone shortly after, since the WP8 APIs are way more similar to Windows 8 than WP7 ones.

Therefore, this fundraiser will help developping a version of VLC for Windows Phone 8. Interestingly, while WP8 offers the same programming interfaces available to Windows 8 & RT apps, it is less restrictive in some regards. Notably our existing networking code is going to run as is.

Then, we've been in touch with Microsoft representatives, who are thrilled a bout our endeavor and ready to collaborate with us. They are looking into ways of supporting us directly through non-financial matters, notably hardware, technical and design help. This is great news.

Moreover, we've been in touch with several designers and some hardware chip vendors about this project.

Regarding admision to the Windows Store, we will need to stick to Microsofts rules and pass a check called WACK. As published in our "Challenges and Risks" section, we will try very hard to fulfill its requirements in order to be published on the Windows Store. Therefore, as this seems the biggest challenge, we have already been working on that aspect, during the last days.

A significant number of backers asked about legal implications of a publication of VLC on the Windows Store. So far, the Windows Store terms and conditions seem to be compatible with the GNU GPL.

About the capability of distributing codecs from the Store, we hope to be able to do it, but we are not sure about it yet. We would like to invite you to have a look at at our generic Legal page on videolan.org, which should answer most questions: VideoLAN - Legal

You are welcome to get in touch if you require more information.

We are proud of this campaign's progress so far and we hope make it within the next 18 days.

We are going to publish more updates this week, including imagery of the current UI mockups as well as a video demonstrating our ideas for Windows Phone.

Thanks for reading!

Jean-Baptiste & Felix for the VLC for Windows 8 team

 

Looks like its coming to WP8 too

[Arthur]

The VLC developers have got a big job ahead of them...

 

Designing a UI above VLC for Metro is quite easy, and we've already done some proof of concept. Finding a designer would be simple and 1k$ for the project would be too much already It would take a couple of months and be done with it.

 

The issue is to get on the store. And this is hard.

 

Why is that?

 

VLC (and its underlying libraries, including codecs, networking and demuxers) represents around 7M LoC of C, C++ and ASM. All of this is very C99 code and inline ASM. Visual Studio cannot eat that in any way. Believe me, we tried. A lot. So we need to compile the VLC for Windows on Linux, using gcc+mingw.

 

Unfortunately, this does not work on WinRT ("Modern UI" or whatever you like to call it). WinRT restricts a lot the Win32 APIs. And only Visual Studio knows which ones. Oh, and the BSD sockets are gone...

 

So, we need to change and update the toolchain, fix MingW for WinRT, rewrite the code that is using Win32 APIs since 10 years (and in all underlying libraries too...), write a new UI above this, fix the code using HWND for rendering, port the audio and video outputs, work-around the sandbox for DVD playback, probably write a WinSock2 replacement library to build all the cross-platform libraries that expect a BSD-socket-like library, etc...

 

Add to that the need to modify MingW to output dlls that we can load on ARM (Windows RT) and fix all the same different APIs for WP8.

 

Of course a lot of the work is not really on VLC, but on being able to compile for WinRT with open source tools, and a lot will be re-usable.

 

So, yes, we will need quite a few developers, and therefore money. (Source)

[RabbieBurns]

they've announced some mock ups of the UI

 

http://cl.ly/image/1h0e093w241M/vlc-app-home.jpg

[SYNACK]

they've announced some mock ups of the UI

 

http://cl.ly/image/1h0e093w241M/vlc-app-home.jpg

 

That looks good, clean and effective.

[CyberNerd]

That looks good, clean and effective.

 

It looks like web page

[RabbieBurns]

more:

 

http://cl.ly/image/110D1t3Q2O2c/app-design.jpg

http://cl.ly/image/1C303y3C3R44/app-tablet-surface.jpg

[SYNACK]

It looks like web page

 

Which one, anyway why are you complaining, aren't you always on about how everything ever should be a web page?

[CyberNerd]

Which one, anyway why are you complaining, aren't you always on about how everything ever should be a web page?

 

I wasn't complaining.... it does look like a web page.

[Arthur]

Interview: We chat with the leaders of the VLC Windows 8 team « Neowin

 

Assuming the campaign is successful, what features does the team expect to put into VLC for Windows 8?

At first, we are going to support all the file playback features known from current versions of VLC as well as most ways to customize playback, be it video filters or a full fledged equalizer. Following this initial step, we will have a closer look at optical media playback as well as network streams. Finally, we'll work on porting to Windows Phone 8.

 

If the campaign fails, does this mean that we will never see a VLC made for the "Modern" UI or that it will simply take a lot longer for the volunteer team to work on it?

The main reason for this campaign is to speed up the development. It is possible that we will get VLC running on "Modern" UI, but at a normal speed, this will probably take a couple of years, and at this point, we will be at Windows Violet (or something...). Usually, all VLC development is done by volunteers in their spare time, but adapting to Windows 8 is an enormous amount of work, notably because there are no open source development tools for it. Therefore we started this fundraiser in order to contract known developers to work on it full-time, to bootstrap the important parts. Seeing the long time it took to get VLC running on Android, we feared that this would be even worse to get it running on Windows 8 and RT. So, while I assume that we would have something for Windows 8 at a certain point if this fundraising campaigns fails, it clearly wouldn't be publicly available any time soon.

 

What can you tell us about the plans to make a Windows Phone 8 version?

Well, once the port on ARM will be done, porting to WP8 is not that much work. It will need some work, of course, to pass WACK with our custom toolchain, but most APIs are common, so it might just work. The big part of the work is the port to ARM for our toolchain, not to port to WP8, as far as we can see... We hope not to be too wrong

 

What else is the VLC team working on at the moment?

We have a number of cool features coming up for VLC 2.1, like support for new codecs and formats, (like adaptive streaming and Blu-Ray), a new audio core as well as significant improvements to VLC for Android and iOS... Additionally, we are constantly looking into ways to get VLC available everywhere for our users!

[Arthur]

They've done it!

 

Dear backers,

 

A few minutes ago, we passed our goal of £40,000 because of you! Thanks so much for the support from more than 2,500 backers like you!

 

Right now, we are working on another update to lay out our additional ideas. We are enthusiastically looking forward to work on this project and providing the best VLC possible for you.

 

Thanks!

-- The VLC for Windows 8 team

 

http://i.imgur.com/egYGX.png

[RabbieBurns]

Technical update on the WinRT port

Update #9 - For backers only · Feb. 12, 2013 · 6 comments

Status

 

So, a few weeks have passed, and we have not spoken a lot about the port on WinRT/Metro/Windows RT/WP8.

 

Of course, some of you will complain, but the main reason for that, is that we've been very busy on VLC So here is what we did, mostly on the technical side

VLC engine

 

The biggest part of the work resides in the port of the VLC engine to a WinRT compatible runtime. A lot of the work we've done so far has been on that.

 

More specifically, we have:

 

ported VLC APIs call to UNICODE (wide chars),

allowed VLC to be compiled for Windows 8 API targets,

upgraded some VLC Win32 API calls,

removed some code-path when compiling for WinRT,

fixed some issues on mingw-w64 toolchain for Windows 8,

prepared a compatibility library,

changed our packaging for WinRT,

improved our audio output for Windows.

 

Winstore compatibility library

 

A lot of work has been and will be on this library, so let me speak a bit more about it.

 

Instead of ifdef-ing the VLC code everywhere for WinRT, we decided to reimplement the forbidden calls in a library that would expose the same old Win32 functions, but implemented with the allowed APIs.

 

The biggest advantage of this approach is that you don't need to modify a lot of your common codebase, and that you don't need to hack all the libraries that are linked to VLC. And this would have been a huge task. Moreover, it allows to adapt to newer versions of Windows more easily.

Moreover, this library will be usable by every other project.

 

But as you can imagine, doing that is quite tricky, since we don't modify VLC, we don't modify the headers, but we insert it at link time...

 

We have done some of the work, but we still have a huge amount of work to do, notably on threads and Winsock reimplementation.

 

This library is hosted in the mingw-w64 repository and will be the main focus of some of us for a bit of time.

Application

 

Above the VLC engine (libVLC), we have a CX/C++ wrapper, in order to expose VLC functions to the application, since libVLC is plain C, and it is compiled in Visual Studio.

 

Above the wrapper, we have the main application.

 

This application is written in C#, compiled in Visual Studio, and uses the wrapper in order to access playback functions.

 

So far, the application has a basic media library, and playback support using VLC engine. The media library UI follows more or less what we've shown in the KickStarter. The player UI wasn't shown, but it looks a bit like the normal Video application, in order to match the official style.

 

The video, so far, is rendered into a memory buffer from libVLC and then is displayed using Direct2D in a video surface. This is not yet the best method, but it is good enough for now.

What's next

 

So, what are we going to work on now:

 

the winstore compat library

the winstore compat library (threads) ,

the winstore compat library (MSVCRT),

the interface, in order to match our promises,

the audio and video outputs, to go faster.

 

A lot of the work is going to go faster now that we have done correctly the beginning and a beta as soon as possible for our backers.

 

Next update should have screenshots

 

Thanks a lot

[RabbieBurns]

no news is good news i guess?

 

I just really hope they provide a .appx I can include in an image

[Arthur]

New update...

 

www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for-the-new-windows-8-user-experience-metro/posts/443562

 

http://i.imgur.com/ZgylUFv.png

 

http://i.imgur.com/66CtZJS.jpg

 

http://i.imgur.com/uHXDhI8.jpg

 

http://i.imgur.com/oSaoQ2f.jpg

 

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 GCC developers.

 

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