14 DAY TRIAL // VLC for Windows 8.1 is already up for grabs, but many users have actually been disappointed with the existing version, pretty much because it lacks many of the features that are available right now on the desktop client.
Thomas Nigro, one of the developers behind the project, confirmed today in a short tweet that VLC for Windows 8.1 is on track to receive an important improvement in terms of performance that would precede some other updates expected to be released in the coming months.
“Working hard on that VLC Windows 8.1 release. Same UI, but much improved code, that's our goal for now. Kind of a first step,” Nigro said.
VLC for Windows 8.1 works only on Windows 8.1 x86 and x64, so it doesn't offer support for Windows RT right now. The developing team, however, said that support for RT is planned for future versions, but no information as to when the release could take place has been provided.
VLC president Jean Baptiste Kemp revealed in March that the Metro port of VLC was still in the beta development stage, but it worked on both Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. Some features were not stable though, he said, but future versions are very likely to fix all these issues.
“As this is a beta, some features are still not perfectly stable, but we are working on that. We thought we should share it with the users, so that people could test and help us,” he posted.
“We are working on all those points, but notably on subtitles and audio quality and stability. Since we now have a release, it will be easier to do releases quite often, as soon as we can.”
Kempf admitted that VLC for Windows 8 is quite a slow application, “and is slower than VLC for desktop for video decoding and has no hardware acceleration,” which is clearly a major setback for all those who are planning to use the app in the Modern UI.
At the same time, audio doesn't work in all configurations and playlists, and streams aren't yet supported by the app. What's more, subtitle support wasn't very good at that time, he explained, “and notably it only supports embedded subtitles; this is our major point of focus for now.”
Of course, everybody's waiting for this new version that's supposed to fix many of these issues, so we'll keep you posted when it's officially released.
Working hard on that VLC Windows 8.1 release. Same UI, but much improved code, that's our goal for now. Kind of a first step.
— Thomas Nigro (@ThomasNigro) June 24, 2014