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