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VLC for Android beta is now available for folks in the US

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vlc media player android beta

As a huge fan of VLC Media Player on my PC I was extremely excited to hear that the app would be making its way to Android two years ago. If you’re not sure what VLC is, it’s a media player that plays pretty much everything without fail, and without you having to go hunting for obscure codecs and plugins.

Unfortunately for those of us in the United States the VLC for Android beta was not immediately made available while the rest of the world got immediate access. Yes, yes — for once, America is last! Thankfully us yanks won’t have to suffer anymore as the app now appears to be available in the Play Store (thanks to the attentive folks at Reddit for the spot). The app also seems to be available for any Canadians who didn’t already have access, though it sounds like not many of the guys up north had any trouble getting it up to this point.

VLC for Android promises to handle most audio and video filetypes like a champ, and even goes beyond that by supporting DVD ISOs, network streams and more. The big glaring issue in its current beta status is that hardware-based decoding only works with a very limited set of hardware, but that’s why we call these things betas.

For now it should prove to be just as useful as anything you have on your phone if you’re tired of having to convert everything you download to a compatible format. The download is available for free in the Google Play Store so check it out by hitting the link below.

Quentyn Kennemer
The "Google Phone" sounded too awesome to pass up, so I bought a G1. The rest is history. And yes, I know my name isn't Wilson.

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10 Comments

  1. VLC has had an app in the store for a while IIRC I never used the old one (from years ago?). Maybe this one is different?

    1. Agree. I had used it over a year ago–it wasn’t very good. Hope this one holds up to the typical VLC promise.

  2. VLC has been available all along to those Americans willing to get it through F-droid…

  3. Options are always good for media playback, but when you’ve had players like MX for as long as we have – we don’t need VLC.

    1. For me, MX is still far superior because of its intuitive and convenient controls with minimal UI. As for the PC, I’ve always stuck to BS player for the borderless play window. I still don’t understand why a border is needed at all when you can just display a rectangle with nothing but the image. VLC is my backup for when BS player cannot decode the file.

    2. True. MX Player beats them all. Ever since a few versions back, when he made DTS codec compatible with all versions MX Player stopped being a trouble to update.
      Frankly, even on PC I’ve only used VLC for a short period of time, because MS Player Classic is much more functional.

      1. My main video player on PC is Windows MEdia Player Classic Home Cinema personally. Handles everything I throw at it with CCCP installed as well.

    3. Yea I agree, MX is far superior with those cool touch controls. I’ve been using it since I had the HTC Eris.

  4. I’ve used the VLC alpha versions and they have been terrible. I think i’ll just stick with my MX Player Pro.

  5. Convert? Who converts? Are we talking about android or ios?

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