14 DAY TRIAL // VLC for Windows 8.1 is finally here, but even though the development process has taken more than a year, the application is only available as a beta build for x86 and x64 versions of Microsoft’s modern operating system.
VLC for Windows 8.1 was officially announced in late 2013 when VideoLAN launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the necessary funds to port the famous application to Windows 8. At that time, VideoLAN developers promised to launch the program a lot sooner, but due to a number of issues, the official unveiling was delayed several times.
Now, the application is available for download, but contrary to what people expected, it’s still in the beta development stage, so a number of bugs could still be experienced.
“VLC for Windows 8 is an experimental port of VLC media player for the WinRT platform. VLC media player is an open source application that plays all multimedia file formats, from files, streams and discs on all platform. This application will play most video file formats, including Ogg, FLAC and MKV,” the official description of the application published in the Windows Store reads.
At this point, the Metro port of VLC is only available for x86 and x64 builds of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, which means that Windows RT users cannot download it for the time being. VideoLAN has however promised to continue work on the project, which means that a launch date is yet to be disclosed.
VLC works on both Windows 8 and 8.1 because “too many people are still on 8.0,” according to VideoLAN's Jean-Baptiste Kempf, but a future update could change this and make it compatible with Windows 8.1 exclusively.
VideoLAN admits that the application “is currently slow” and, what’s more, it’s “slower than VLC for desktop for video decoding and has no hardware acceleration.” Subtitle might not work very well either, the company said, and embedded subtitles are the only ones supported right now.
Audio doesn’t work in all configurations, the developers added, while playlists and streams are not supported in the user interface, but they’re however included in the core engine.
Of course, it’s pretty obvious that some users might not be satisfied with the way the application is working, but there’s no doubt that it’s still worth a try, so you can download VLC for Windows 8.1 right now to see what it brings in the Metro UI of Microsoft’s modern operating system.
