VLC for Mac Death Is ‘Greatly Exaggerated’

One piece over at the VideoLAN.org site claims that rumors of VLC for Mac being close to its end are greatly exaggerated. “VLC for Mac is being maintained,” the post explains. “However the old Cocoa graphical interface of VLC is not being maintained at this time.” That’s pretty much what all the fuss is about, it further explains. The thing with developers-needed is also true.

“The reason is that we are in the process of rewriting a new interface for VLC,” the piece continues to inform fans of the media player. “Its codename is Lunettes. Why a rewrite? This is something really easy to see. VLC for Mac is just not ‘Mac’ enough,” it stresses. It looks like this might actually turn into something even better than expected.

“So far, we could name 3 reasons for that,” the post reads on. “VLC for Mac must attract designers,” a first motive goes. “They can't easily give a refresh of the graphical interface. Hence, we have decided to offer to designers the possibility to edit via a simple text file the look of VLC. Even Windows and Fullscreen Head-Up-Display can be changed using CSS,” it says.

“VLC for Mac's interface code comes from the 2000s,” is the second reason. “We need to refresh it,” it adds. “We want to use VLCKit which is pure Cocoa, Objective-C 2.0 with bindings supports. This will help us concentrate on features. As a positive side effect, we'll not use old non-64 bits compatible APIs,” it reveals. The third and most important reason for refresh... “VLC for Mac needs a good interface to be the best Video Player.”

The poster speaks in the name of the entire team helping develop VLC, saying, “We want to make sure you'll get the best experience ever when watching your favorite TV shows or Movies using VLC. For instance, if I am watching a TV show, and then quit Lunettes. At next launch Lunettes will offer you to go back to where you were. Then, we added a better way to visualize the media discovery. This is a seldom known feature of VLC. Now, if you are on a local network that streams TV content (Freebox), Lunettes will automatically show them. Then the famous playlist fades out: It is not visible by default, and you don't have to use it anymore.” He outlines some of the milestones for the Mac version of the player. For now, VLC for Mac has stopped at version 1.0.3.