Unofficial VLC Player comes to Android

While we seem to be waiting a life time for the official VLC Player to land on Android, one developer over on XDA has taken it into his own hands and compiled an App which is available to download here

The App itself is in Beta so expect some bugs or quirks. You need to match up the chipset from your phone with which version to download but all is explained over on the thread. A lot of the common processors are supported but not all, however there is ICS support.

For devices that don’t come with great support for different video codecs, this App will be a blessing. So far in the few hours I have been using it on a Galaxy Nexus it is standing out as one of the better Media Player Apps I have reviewed.

Once launched the App searches your phone for available media and sorts the results into categories. Music and video are also conveniently segregated via a toggle at the top of the screen.

I did find that the App was not indexing videos in “.m4v” formats and even when I manually pointed the App to one of these files it wouldn’t play it, but hopefully that will be ironed out in future releases. Not bad considering how many others it managed to play.

The App has a straight forward interface once playing media with the usual options of changing image size, locking the screen and a seek bar. The pause button can also be slid both directions to travel to a particular time in what you are watching.

There are some little bugs along the way but all told it is a great to see VLC on Android even if it’s not an official version so the developer deserves great credit.