Video support on Apple’s mobile devices is far from universal and that’s an issue that Applidium hopes to solve with its submission of VLC, the open-source video player, to the App Store.
According to the company’s release, “if everything goes well, VLC for the iPad should be available next week”.
The free video player supports “nearly every video format” and when we asked Romain Goyet, co-founder of Applidium, if it supported Flash (the most obvious and controversial of missing video formats), he told us “This unfortunately I cannot answer right now (you guess why 🙂 ).”
While he expects the player to be available in the App Store for download by September 14, it will initially only be available for the iPad, with a version for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the works. Goyet had a few other details to offer about the potential release:
As compared to the “desktop” version, the user interface will be quite a lot different, to fit the iPad.
Behind the scene, the engine is the one from the “ususal” version of VLC, so it should play pretty much anything you throw at it.
One small difference though : even though the iPad is a really neat device, it’s nowhere as powerful as your desktop machine / laptop. So it might have a hard time decoding HD movies, but that’s a hardware limitation.
According to a recent tweet, a pre-release version will be given out to a small number of users this weekend, before it hits the app store.
Of course, inclusion in the app store is not guaranteed. Mobile browser Skyfire was submitted to the App Store just over a week ago and there is still no word on its acceptance or rejection. The browser aims to bring Flash video, not applications, to Apple’s mobile devices using transcoding. Although Goyet doesn’t directly speak to whether or not Flash video would be supported, it could be a point of contention for accepting the app. And if the app isn’t trying to vie for Flash support, there are a number of other media types that would be great to see on the iPad, outside of those currently supported.
