Last Updated on September 18, 2016 by Larious
After a long development period, VideoLAN is finally releasing VLC for Android 2.0. Our last major release was 1.7.0, more than 6 months ago.
VLC for Android 2.0 is a major update to VLC for Android, that adds numerous features, notably, support for new releases of Android, network shares browsing and playback, video playlists, subtitles downloader, pop-up video view and support for multiwindows, an optional history panel, favoritenetwork shares and URLs, and a merge between the Android TV and Android packages. We also offer faster decoding, using our new asynchronous hardware decoder and we’ve updated most of our codecs and formats support.
Table of Contents
Features
Permissions and Android N
The first good news is that we have decreased the number of dangerous permissions that VLC was using. The only permission that is now considered as dangerous is the access to media files, which is expected for a media player. On top of that, we support the Android N runtime permissions:
Network Browsing
One of the most requested features, since the creation of the application, was the playback of network shares and local servers in VLC. It’s mostly done.
We support DLNA/UPnP, Windows Shares, FTP(S), SFTP, NFS protocols to discover and browse your local servers or your NAS. And we also detect associated subtitles over the network!
Subtitles Download
If you want to download subtitles directly from OpenSubtitles, without going to the website, it’s now directly integrated in the application:
Video Playlists
As we’ve done for audio, we support basic video playlists
Pop-up
Another often requested feature, was the popup-video view, mostly for tablets.
It’s now implemented and we do support Samsung MultiWindow and LG Dual Window extensions to allow 2 applications on the same screen.
History
The history feature that was present in the 0.9.x days is also back, but can be disabled.
Advanced Options
We’ve improved the options of the video player and we simplified the landscape/portrait modes
RTL and CTL
Finally, we’ve done a lot of work to support Right-To-Left and Complex Text Layout subtitles
We also improved the interface to support RTL layouts.
