Tag: release

VLC for iOS, version 2.6.0

Today, we will release version 2.6.0 of VLC for iOS adding support for Apple Watch. With Apple Watch, you can fully control VLC on iPhone, browse the library and retrieve info about stored or playing media items.

Since playback control using Apple Watch allows you to start playback while the app is in background, we took the occasion to completely rework the playback process which culminated in the introduction of a mini player. This way, you can finally browse the media library or network services without interrupting playback.

Further, we added the ability to loop playlists and access to PLEX shares requiring authentication. Finally, thumbnails displayed in the local media library now reflect playback progress and will show the last played frame.

Version 2.6.0 of VLC for iOS includes the largest number of bug fixes and improvements we ever shipped in a single update for this platform. They are affecting virtually all parts of the app and will lead to a greatly improved user experience. Please scroll down if you are curious about the details.

One last thing: since VLC for iOS includes a large amount of white artwork which is virtually invisible in Xcode, Tobias developed a fix for that.

This major update is the result of 3 months of work and I would like to thank Tobias, Carola and Pierre for their dedication to make this possible.

Full change log:

  • Added support for Apple Watch – control VLC from your watch!
    • playback control
    • media info
    • library browsing
  • Added mini-player to browse the library during playback (#13367)
  • Added support for looping playlists
  • New ingest mechanism for audio files
  • Improved remote command support
  • Improved thumbnail generation
  • Improved thumbnail and web interface performance on devices with A5 CPU and above
  • Fixed crash when playing media from a folder or music album on iPad (#14394, #14706)
  • Fixed crash when app goes to background while a video is playing (#14643)
  • Fixed privacy leak when using a passcode to protect the library (#14159, #14615)
  • Removed stray popup announcing VLC’s crash all the time while it actually
    didn’t crash before, but was terminated by the user (#13194)
  • Added support for the PLEX Web API
  • Thumbnails displayed in the media library are updated to the last playback position (#14462)
  • Improved reliability when sharing media library on the local network
  • Improved media library search delivering more accurate results (#14593)
  • Fixed ‘crop to fill screen’ on iPad (#14575)
  • Fixed issue which prevented downloading of a few files via UPnP (#11123)
  • Fixed crash when screen is being locked during playback (#14610)
  • A large number of bug fixes affecting most parts of the app (#13194, #14056, #14270, #14284, #14355, #14477, #14588, #14589, #14609, #14623, #14624, #14628, #14629, #14635, #14638, #14641, #14642, #14654, #14663, #14687, #14688, #14713, #14715, #14716, #14733, #14736, #14795, #14800, #14801, #14829)

VLC for iOS 2.5.0

Today, we released version 2.5.0 of VLC for iOS with a strong focus on cloud integration. We added support for iCloud Drive, box.com and OneDrive. As part of iCloud Drive, you can have access to any cloud storage enabled app on iOS 8 and later. For box.com and OneDrive, we added native support, which allows us direct streaming from the cloud without having the user download a media first.

Furthermore, we cleaned-up the playback experience matching recent changes in VLC for Android and added the full 10-band equalizer known from VLC’s desktop ports. While reworking playback, we also integrated support for titles and chapters included in a few Matroska / MKV and MP4 files. Due to popular request, you can also lock the UI and rotation during playback.

One last thing: you can share your media library between multiple devices on the same local network now! If you enable WiFi sharing and keep VLC active, it will appear in the “Local Network” tab of all iOS devices running VLC supporting both device to device streaming as well as downloads.

Finally, we added a couple of new translations to Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Khmer, Faroese, Belarusian, Serbian (Latin), Tamil and Afrikaans along with the usual set of bug fixes and minor improvements.

We hope you like this new version as much as we do.

VLC for iOS 2.4.0 & 2.4.1

After a 5 month hiatus and a couple of delays in between, we are very happy to release version 2.4.1 of VLC for iOS to the general public today. Please see our press release for cross-platform information.

As an introductory remark, make sure to get the legitimate version of VLC. There are a number of clones on the iOS App Store right now, which violate both our copyright and our trademarks, include advertisement and usually charge $1 to $5 per download. We sent 39 DMCA take down notices against 48 apps over the cause of the last 12 months and in the end, we always succeeded. However, this can take up to 3 months, even for seemingly obvious violations.

As a consequence to those continued violations, VLC for iOS’s source code repository will no longer be publicly accessible, but archives of the stable releases only.

So, what’s new in VLC for iOS?

  • Support for iPhone 6 and 6+
  • Native support for Plex using their custom protocol
  • File Sharing with third party apps
  • Media library search
  • Custom URL scheme based on x-callback-url
  • Greatly improved UPnP support
  • In addition to uploading media via WiFi, you can also download all the media stored within VLC using a simple web browser
  • Streaming and folder support for Google Drive
  • Flat folder synchronization via iTunes
  • Options for default playback speed and FTP text encoding
  • On-the-fly audio and subtitles track synchronization
  • And a large number of small features, improvements and bug fixes as well as a new translation to Traditional Chinese.

This release removes support for Dolby Digital (AC-3), Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3) and Dolby TrueHD (MLP) for the foreseeable future due to a content dispute with Dolby Laboratories, which could not be resolved in a different way.

We are very happy with this major version of VLC for iOS and hope that you’ll like it as much as we do. Further, we are excited about the things we have in our pipeline for the forthcoming releases. A first beta of version 2.5 will be released to our testers today.

VLC 2.1

Today, we published VLC media player 2.1.1 for all major desktop operating systems. If you used VLC for Android or for iOS in the last couple of months, you already got in touch with VLC’s 2.1 code base.

VLC media player 2.1 was initially published on September 26. However, we didn’t enable VLC’s internal updater since then. Why? We spent extra time on polishing the release, added support for the upcoming major video codec HEVC aka H.265 in MKV and MP4 containers as well as raw files, and lastly improved compatibility with both OS X 10.6 and 10.9.


2.1 is a major release for us, something we worked on since September 2011. We took the time to entirely re-write VLC’s audio output structure resolving architectural issues, improving lip synchronization, enhanced efficiency and improved device management. On the Mac, this upgrade also adds full support for external audio output devices and 6.1 / 7.1 / 8.1 / 10.2 multi-channel layouts.

On OS X, we finally added support for hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding with further improvements including support for MPEG 2 and H263 scheduled for this winter season. Furthermore, video capturing using AVFoundation is supported on OS X 10.7 and later as well as recording the current screen contents, a feature previously supported on 10.5 and 10.6 only.

VLC 2.1 completes the transition to our re-written Mac interface introduced in version 2.0 with various major improvements, further customization options including additional playlist columns, support for cloned and split video output windows, as well as customizable presets for video filters, audio filters, and the equalizer. A new “Subtitles” menu embraces VLC advanced compatibility with any textual or bitmapped format and allows the user to customize text styles and size on-the-fly during playback. An all-new “Convert/Stream” panel simplifies media to file conversations as well as setup of streams on the local network or the internet. The media library and playlist view gains full Podcast support known from our ports to Windows and Linux.

Those major improvements have a drawback though: VLC 2.1 no longer supports any 32bit Intel-based Macs and any PowerPC-based Macs. It requires OS X 10.6 or later. For the older  Macs, we published another bug fix release last week, 2.0.9, fixing various annoyances and resolving all known security issues. Macs compatible with VLC 2.1 will be offered the update automatically while the others will remain on 2.0.9 with the potential option for a future 2.0.10 release, should it be needed.

We have great news for developers: VLC’s underlying work-horse, libVLC, as well as most of its modules were relicensed to LGPLv2.1+. This allows any interested party to deploy our proven code their own apps and solutions. As showcase apps, we developed VLC for Android and VLC for iOS demonstrating libVLC’s features. While libVLC is a C library, an all-Objective-C framework named VLCKit is available for Apple platforms. Native Java bindings are available for Android, too.

We hope you enjoy VLC 2.1 as much as we do and we are looking forward to further releases in our pipeline on track for release this winter.