Last year one of the big questions surrounding Windows 8 was whether the new operating system would natively support the audio and video codec’s that we use regularly to watch out favorite movies and shows. We quickly learned that the native support was rather limited, and that we would need to depend on third party apps for watching other types of videos, such as MKV files. Then, in December, the VLC team announced that they were planning to release a Windows 8 “metro-style” port of their incredibly popular free video player.
Unfortunately, while we were very excited to get VLC, especially on the Surface RT, progress has been fairly slow. Today the VLC team sent an update to their Kickstarter backers giving them an update on their status. While it’s been slow-going, they are close now. They’ve been able to pass the Windows 8 application certification test, but one of their major changes to pass the test broke audio support. They do say that they think they know how to fix the issue, and that once they do they will finally be releasing a version to their Kickstarter backers.
From the latest update:
We’ve been quite busy lately (VLC 2.1.0 release), but we have quite good news: we’ve finally been able to pass the validation for the Application, as you can see here:
As you might see, we did that a couple of weeks ago, but we wanted to fix an important issue before sharing it with you. We were not able to do as fast as we wanted, so we do the update anyway 🙂
We were able to integrate a new networking layer, without violating the Store guidelines, work-around the threading limitations (with a hack, though) and rewrite some more code.
So far, the main issue is that to pass the validation, we had to cut the audio completely.
Who needs audio to play a movie anyway? 😀
We have a theoretical solution, but it still fails for unknown reasons.We are working on fixing this audio issue and we will share a build to you backers, as soon as it is done.
Thanks for the support.
VLC team
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