The update also introduces support for 360-degree videos

Dec 6, 2017 11:47 GMT  ·  By

After more than a year of silence, VideoLAN recently updated the VLC for Android media player app with a lot of new stuff, numerous improvements, and much more.

Coming more than a year after the VLC 2.0 release, VLC 2.5 has hit the Google Play Store over the weekend and it's a major update that adds support for 360-degree videos, a more dynamic and Material Design-compliant user interface, Picture-in-Picture mode for Android Oreo devices, as well as DayNight mode integration.

VLC for Android is now integrated with Google Now and comes with a new Search activity, refactors the MediaLibrary, adds support for latest Chrome OS operating system with Android apps support, improves RTL (Right-to-Left) support, implements custom equalizer presets, and boosts audio in the video player.

"VLC for Android releases have been trapped in VLC 3.0 preparation and big media library refactoring black holes. So, there hasn’t been any update for 13 months, but development is still active and cool new stuff is coming," writes Geoffrey Métais, Android developer at VideoLAN, on his latest blog post.

Improved app and video player startup time

Among other noteworthy features implemented in the VLC 2.5 for Android release, we can mention that the audio player background now offers a blurred version of current art cover, makes it possible to resume the position for audio media tagged as podcast or audiobook, and improves the startup times of the application and video player.

It also lets users seek videos by 10 seconds when double tapping on the screen edges of their Android device, and implements Android Auto compatibility. The Android TV interface has been improved as well in this release, which removes sound lowering on notification and adds support for devices with large aspect ratios, such as Samsung Galaxy S8 and LG G6 smartphones.

Playback performance was improved as well with support for VP8, VP9, and VP10 in MP4, Adaptive (HLS/Dash) and TS formats, as well as HDMI passthrough. The app now uses OpenGLES 2.0 for rendering videos. You can download VLC 2.5 for Android right now from the Google Play store and enjoy a better video playback experience on your Android device.

Dynamic UI
Search
Voice search
Video sorting

VLC 2.5 for Android (12 Images)

Picture-in-Picture mode
Dynamic UISearch
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