14 DAY TRIAL // VLC for Windows 8 was launched after approximately one year since VideoLAN raised the necessary funds for the project, but the version that reached the store earlier this year still lacks important features and comes with a number of bugs that affecting the overall experience with the Metro app.
It turns out that all of these are going to change soon, as one of the developers working on the Windows 8.1 version of VLC confirmed that the app is getting a new design, while its code would be specifically optimized to make the app more responsive.
“Working on VLC for Windows 8.1 ... :) New design coming, more responsive and 8.1-ish,” Thomas Nigro, one of the developers working on the Metro port of VLC, said on Twitter recently.
Working on VLC for Windows 8.1 ... :) New design coming, more responsive and 8.1-ish
— Thomas Nigro (@ThomasNigro) April 27, 2014
The VLC version that's currently available for Windows 8 users is still in the beta development stage, so you might come across a number of bugs affecting subtitle support, performance with specific formats and limited support for playlists and streams.
“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,” VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf said in a blog post soon after the launch of VLC for Windows 8.
The application, however, still comes with support for all video formats out there, including MKV and FLAC, and rely on a very intuitive interface that's completely optimized for the touch and makes everything very easy to use.
“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 app description published in the store reads.
VideoLAN started a Kickstarter campaign to raise the necessary funds to port VLC to Windows 8 in 2012 and more than 3,000 backers donated €57,000 ($78,900) to see one of the world's top multimedia players running on Microsoft's modern operating system as well.
The official launch of VLC for Windows 8, however, took place more than one year after that, with VideoLAN developers explaining that porting the app to this OS version is particularly difficult due to a number of limitations and because of Microsoft's certification process.