14 DAY TRIAL // Over at the VideoLan forum, a post titled “VLC is looking for MacOS X developers” reveals that there are currently “zero” developers handling the Mac version of the popular media player. “As an immediate consequence, the 64-bits releases for MacOS has already been put on hold,” VideoLAN Lead Developer Rémi Denis-Courmont says. Support for Mac OS X may be discontinued as of VLC 1.1.0, if the situation is not remedied, the developer sadly informs.
By posting this piece online, Softpedia hopes to help spread the word that VLC for Mac is in danger. We encourage our readers to do so as well.
VLC Media Player is one of the most popular players out there that also works as a multimedia framework. It can play almost any audio and video formats available today, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac, and more. In addition, the player can also read DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs and a series of streaming protocols.
“VLC is looking for MacOS X developers,” Rémi Denis-Courmont writes. “There are now effectively zero active developers for MacOS. As an immediate consequence, the 64-bits releases for MacOS has already been put on hold. I don't need to mention the stale status of the MacOS user interface,” he adds. “If it goes on like this, MacOS support may be discontinued as of VLC 1.1.0. There is nobody to make the necessary updates to the MacOS support code, for instance to support the new VLC video output architecture. Taking into account the learning curve to VLC development, I think it is fair to say that the situation is now critical,” his post ends.
VideoLAN earlier said that rumors of VLC for Mac being close to its end were greatly exaggerated. “VLC for Mac is being maintained,” the post explained. “However the old Cocoa graphical interface of VLC is not being maintained at this time [...] The reason is that we are in the process of rewriting a new interface for VLC,” the piece continued 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,” the people at VideoLAN stressed in December.