[Windows app] VLC for Windows 8 now available, coming soon to Windows RT and Windows Phone

The VideoLan team has finally released the first beta version of long-awaited Metro-inspired VLC media player for Windows 8 devices. VLC Play for Windows 8 will play several multimedia file formats similar to its desktop counterpart.

You can download the latest version directly on Windows device running the x86 or x64 platform through the Windows Store. You can also download the app using the following link.

Download
Price	Free
Requirement	Windows 8

VLC for Windows is currently not available for Windows RT, nor is it available on Windows Phone. But the team promises that those platforms will soon be supported by the popular media player.

VLC for Windows 8 has the following features:

• Works on Windows 8.0 and 8.1: too many people are still on 8.0, so we had to use that. This decreases the stability of the application, though…
• Is compiled for Intel x86 CPUs: Windows RT version will follow as soon as we are able to compile it. ARM version will also apply to Windows Phone.
• Plays all video and audio formats of VLC, including MKV, Ogg and Mov files or FLAC and MPC;
• Supports the same codecs as the VLC application for desktop, from MPEG-1 to H.265, through WMV3 and VC-1;
• Supports multiple-audio tracks selection;
• Supports embedded subtitles;
• Supports Background Audio playback;
• Features a easy-to-navigate but complete UI, notably for audio browsing;
• Supports Live Tiles!
• Supports removable storage and DLNA servers.

The team notes that there are few issues they are working on and promises frequent updates. The beta app has no hardware acceleration, audio does not work in all configurations, playlists and streams are not supported in the UI and the subtitles support is not very good (only supports embedded subtitles). The beta app is also slower than VLC for desktop for video decoding.

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