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 for iOS, version 2.2.1

Today, we released a small update of VLC for iOS. It solves the most important regressions in last week’s 2.2 major release, but also includes a major improvement: full initial support of 64bit aka AArch64 aka arm64 on late 2013’s iPhone and iPad thanks to a close collaboration with the libav team.

Additionally, we added enhanced support for a broader set of UPnP servers, notably Twonky 7, Serviio 1.4 and XMBC 12, and resolved an inconvenient memory management issue in the underlying upnp library, which lead to the weird behavior that from a full folder only a single file would actually be played over and over again.

Regarding VLC for iOS’ networking capabilities, the option to manipulate the caching level was implemented in the same way as known from its desktop counterparts. Furthermore, ftp streams respect non-ASCII file encodings and URLs with spaces correctly now. Streaming from Dropbox is more reliable, too.

Finally, we increased the readability of metadata displayed on iPad (iOS 7), solved stability regressions on iOS 6 and implemented a more intelligent thumbnailing mechanism.

Oh, and your TV show episodes disappeared with the last update? That’s solved, too. Sorry for the confusion and the trouble this database edge-case caused.