14 DAY TRIAL // VideoLAN today launched VLC for Windows 8, more than one year after the company raised the necessary funds to port the application to Microsoft’s Modern UI.
Even though it was launched with much fanfare and people called for the team behind the project to speed up the development process, VLC for Windows 8 is a rather buggy application that’s affected by several critical issues on both x64 and x86 versions of the operating system.
At this point, VLC for Windows 8 has an average rating of 3.4 in the Windows Store, which is not at all bad for an app launched only a few hours ago. On the other hand, it already received 48 one-star ratings, and many users who submitted comments to the store actually criticized its performance.
“Soon after the home screen comes up, the app crashes. Every. Single. Time. For a year in development, I’d expect better results,” one of the users who installed the app wrote.
“If it’s a beta, why isn’t there a clear way to submit bugs? Opening the videos tab always makes it lock up and crash. Some videos crash, others drop frames. Some audio is coming out of the rear speakers instead of the front,” another one added.
“Been waiting a long time for this. I guess I’ll be waiting a while longer for it to get fully baked.”
But all of these are not at all surprising, especially given the fact that the application is still in the beta development stage. VideoLAN's President Jean-Baptiste Kempf said in a post on his blog that VLC for Windows 8 still has a few limitations, some of which could influence the overall performance of the app.
“This app is currently slow, and is slower than VLC for desktop for video decoding and has no hardware acceleration,” he said, while also adding that subtitle support is not very good, while audio doesn’t work in all configurations.
“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.”
VLC for Windows 8 is currently available only on x86 and x64 versions of Windows 8, but a Windows RT port is also expected to be launched sometime this year. It will provide support for all RT tablets, including Microsoft’s very own Windows RT. A Windows Phone build is also expected to debut later this year, but again, no specifics have been provided.