Update on the VLC for Windows 8 fundraiser

In this post, you’ll find current information on our fundraiser for VLC for Windows 8, RT and Phone.

As of writing, £13,448 were pledged, so 33 % of our goal.

Over the last few days, we achieved the following progress:

The first important news is that a port of VLC to Windows Phone 8 appears to be easier than expected. While the roadmap is about Windows 8 for Intel followed by a version for Windows RT, it appears to be feasible to publish another version with a specific interface for Windows Phone shortly after, since the WP8 APIs are way more similar to Windows 8 than WP7 ones.

Therefore, this fundraiser will help developping a version of VLC for Windows Phone 8. Interestingly, while WP8 offers the same programming interfaces available to Windows 8 & RT apps, it is less restrictive in some regards. Notably our existing networking code is going to run as is.

Then, we’ve been in touch with Microsoft representatives, who are thrilled about our endeavor and ready to collaborate with us. They are looking into ways of supporting us directly through non-financial matters, notably hardware, technical and design help. This is great news.

Moreover, we’ve been in touch with several designers and some hardware chip vendors about this project.

Regarding admision to the Windows Store, we will need to stick to Microsofts rules and pass a check called WACK. As published in our “Challenges and Risks” section, we will try very hard to fulfill its requirements in order to be published on the Windows Store. Therefore, as this seems the biggest challenge, we have already been working on that aspect, during the last days.

A significant number of backers asked about legal implications of a publication of VLC on the Windows Store. So far, the Windows Store terms and conditions seem to be compatible with the GNU GPL.

About the capability of distributing codecs from the Store, we hope to be able to do it, but we are not sure about it yet. We would like to invite you to have a look at at our generic Legal page on videolan.org, which should answers most questions: http://videolan.org/legal.html

You are welcome to get in touch if you require more information.

We are proud of this campaign’s progress so far and we hope make it within the next 19 days.

We are going to publish more updates this week, including imagery of the current UI mockups as well as a video demonstrating our ideas for Windows Phone.

You can find our kickstarter project here.

NB: This post was shared on Kickstarter as Update #1.