To talk about VLC Media Player is to talk about a flagship media application and a paradigmatic example of open source development. Born in 1996 as an academic project, it’s evolved and adapted to the times with every new version that’s appeared. The Android app development has followed the same steps, although the updates have sometimes left rather more to be desired. Hence why the rollout of this new version (2.5.0) is cause for celebration, what with the addition of so many new features.
The new VLC Media Player for Android has been a heck of a long time coming. The previous version, number 2.0.6, dates back to August 2016 and more than a year has had to pass before we could lay eyes on this new stable app. That is quite unusual in the Android world, although the open source character of VLC makes this media player rather more special than the rest. At the most basic level, a bunch of novelties have been implemented to upgrade the app and its performance, and it now runs faster than ever.
What most jumps out at you initially is the nicer design of the app interface, which now is more dynamic and has a Material Design flavor. Some small modifications have improved navigation through the interface: tap either side of the screen twice to fast forward or rewind by 10 seconds, check an icon on the main screen to see whether you’ve watched a video, use the integrated Google Now or improved multimedia search tool, and more …
A basic user might not find that many differences with respect to prior versions, but VLC has actually made some pretty big leaps forward here. Not just in terms of its interface – it’s also been brought right up to date with everything happening on Android, including support for 360-degree videos, the AV1 codec, and the picture-in-picture mode for people who have an Android 0 device. The full list of changes is right here, but we’ll give you our verdict on them in advance: this multimedia player is 100% worth your time, as we already told you when we blogged about the best open source apps on Android.
VLC Media Player for Android on Uptodown [APK] | Download
