VLC Kickstarter campaign for Windows 8 port
The popular media player VLC is currently only available for the desktop part of the Windows 8 operating system, and here only on systems running Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro or Enterprise, but not Windows RT, which Surface tablets run on for instance.
A demo of the player has been released as a video in the beginning of November, but it was not really clear back then if, how and when the player would make its debut as a Windows 8 Store application.
A campaign on the popular Kickstarter crowd financing platform sheds some light into future development plans. The VLC development team needs £40,000 to create a VLC application for Windows 8 that will run on the start screen on both Intel and ARM systems.
Here is the presentation that VLC has uploaded as part of the campaign.
What is probably most interesting from an end user perspective is the intention to build a media player that supports CD, DVD and unencrypted Blu-Ray playback out of the box without need for media packages and the like. As you may know, Media Player does not support DVD playback on Windows 8 until an add-on package is bought and installed. While that is free right now, it will come as a price in the future.
The developers plan to create a version of VLC that will be offered in Windows Store to reach the maximum number of users. This is actually the only way the program can be made available for users of Windows RT.
VLC for Windows 8 will be created by core members of the VideoLan team who will work full time on the project if the funding goal is reached. About that: VideoLan has set the goal to £40,000 which may not sound like much in times when certain games ask for one million Dollar or more. Considering that you are not getting a game in the end, but an application that is offered for free in the store, it could become a challenging goal.
Pledges start at £3 which will add your name to the list of sponsors. You get a VLC for Windows 8 t-shirt at £40. Companies may be interested in a banner opportunity on the VLC for windows 8 website for a limited amount of time.
£2400 of the requested amount have been reached so far with 29 days to go. Do you think that VideoLan will achieve the amount they are hoping to get?
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Meh – if they don’t port it, someone else will. That’s just how OSS projects work.
Good stuff. They got my pledge.
I think, they won’t. Supporting Windows 8 / Metro / Modern / Windows RT isn’t priority for OSS community, as far as I see.
Why I would support Metro port if I’m not going to use Metro at all?
Let Microsoft pay for the project.
why ? vlc is already on desktop and work great !
Well, Windows RT users can’t install the regular version, it is their only hope of getting VLC on their system.
It’s hard to like both free software and Microsoft. :) More often one have to choose, and chose one from two. So, I think only a very small part of VLC users want Windows RT (where they can’t use most of old apps they like anyway), and most of men who stand with MS, probably want Windows Media Player, not VLC.
Even more, it remains to be seen if Win RT take off or became the next big flop.
I am very doubtful that Microsoft Store will (or can) approve an app that can play DVDs and Blu-Ray discs out of the box. It would violate agreements that Microsoft has with the DVD-CCA and DCP LLC for the DRM that protects those discs.
I would have donated, but I hope windows 8 dies a quick death. I work in the Support field, and I hope to hell it doesn’t get much traction and migrate to the work place. I worked at Microsoft back when Windows Millennium was released and it was such a boondoggle and I see windows 8 as a sad attempt to monetize apps. Too little too late for MS, and a bad development in the GUI for the work place. They spent the last 30 years training PC folks to use a specific style of GUI and they changed the game. Bad Form.
” I see windows 8 as a sad attempt to monetize apps.” – Well, no, operating systems were bound to head in the direction of touch-screen support and languages running under OS-supported VM’s (as in the .Net or Java kind of VM), which can give much tighter security, and work on multiple architectures without need of recompiling (for instance, ARM chips as faster, cheaper, and generate less heat, but we still use x86 for backwards compatibility…).
The reason I’m against Windows 8 is that I don’t approve of the way they segmented apps from everything else, both in the UI and internally. It makes it feel like I’m running two separate operating systems. Also, I don’t look forward to re-educating users who are used to having a start menu, and don’t understand why they took it out to begin with.