*Unofficial* VLC Player for Android available; Supports all file types, GB and ICS

Well this is a nice thing to be alerted to. It looks like XDA memberÂ adridu59Â has very recently release a beta build of VLC media player for Android users to enjoy. Many of you may know all that there is to know about VLC as an actual PC application. In a nutshell, it is a kickbutt free universal media player for your PC. The primary app supports a plethora of file types and give you a great amount of control over subtitles, adjusting color, add your own text to the movie and it even has an audio converter built-in. I know I have used it for many years as my primary video player on PC. Now I can use the same software on my phone.

First things first though, this is not supported by the actual VLC team. This is a beta, work in progress, application that adridu59 is building from source. He is slowly, but surely increasing the device compatibility list for all those variousÂ processorsÂ that we have running around the Android world. The app is currently supported on both Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread. Of course your experience may be different from another user based on stock to a custom ROM. Check out the current features below –

Features :

Gingerbread & ICS support
Hardware acceleration supportÂ [Buggy]
Headset detection
Almost all media formats *should* be working (DTS/MPEG2/Theora still WIP)
Remember that this is still WIP

He currently has support in for seven different chipsets. Knowing what chip your device is using will be key to checking out the beta as there are threeÂ differentÂ apks to choose from. I just installed it myself on my Galaxy S, it installed fine, opened fine and ran through its search of media files on my device. Some comments in the thread claim issues and other various problems. They seem to be all over the place. With some devices having success while others with the same device are not. More than likely it is due to the wrong file downloaded or ROM compatibility issues.

At first launch you agree that it is a beta, it says alpha in the pop up, and then the app proceeds to scan all your files to find music, movies and other types of media. It had no issues find all media of various types. There is a music layout that has a swipe navigation style to it to choose between all songs, Artists, Albums or Genres. I only had a couple of MP3 albums in there and it played those just fine.

As for movies, I had no issues playing any of the MP4’s that I had recently converted. The picture quality was perfect and audio was in sync. It played fine in both landscape and portrait mode for me. Tapping the screen will bring up the players controls during a movie. It has your standard location slider, pause and play buttons. The pause button doubles as your fast forward and rewind feature. Instead of tapping on it you literally press and hold then drag. It lets you go forward or backwards in the video anywhere from 1 second to 60 seconds. It also has various aspect ratios available; 4:3, 16:9,Â fill, center and fit vertical. When skipping around a movie to various locations I experience ZERO lag. That is saying something. As fast as I could pop around the time line the movie bounced and played.

From the thirty minutes or so I have played around with it, I am loving it. I haven’t had a chance to test out the other file formats the developer states work, but just from the regular files I already have in my memory, this is going to be my new player. I also never had to once enable the hardware acceleration either. You guys should go check it out and get it installed. Head over to adridu59’s XDA thread for the files, updates and other information, be sure to hit the thanks button too.

Thanks for the tipÂ anonymous