Danny Gorog26 June 2008, 5:00 PM
Tired of transcoding those DivX movies to play correctly on your iDevice? Wouldn't it be great if someone came up with a media player that supported all the codecs?
Well, according to a developer called ZodTTD, VLC
for the iPhone is nearly ready to come out of the oven. Don't expect to
see it show up on the official Apps store though, it's strictly only
going to be available for Jailbroken iPhones/iPod Touches.
According to Zods
Blog, 'vlc4iphone is a port of VLC' (In case you haven't heard of
VLC, it's a very capable media player, available for Mac, Windows and Linux). The current version, 9.9.5 already supports FLV (Flash Video), XviD (DivX), MP4 (MPEG4), MOV (Quicktime) H264 (incl. Hi Def), 3GP (Mobile movies) and WMV movies. For music aficionados there's baked in support for OGG, FLAC and MP3. Apart from expanded codec support, Zod says that vlc4iphone will also include support Internet Radio and Video on Demand streaming.
While the interface is already nearing a usable
state, it's likely that transferring media files on to the iPhone will
be the hardest part of the using VLC, and will likely be a manual process requiring a working knowledge of FTP, SMB or AFP.
Also, in its current beta incarnation, vlc4iphone can't access the hardware decoder in the iPhone which means that all decoding needs to be done within the software. Zod
says because the iPhone is designed for a maximum resolution of 480 x 320
there are performance issues when trying to play back higher resolution
videos from within the player. This might be resolved in future
versions of the app.
We'll reserve judgement until we've seen vlc4iphone, but until then there's the excellent
Visual Hub for all your video re-encoding needs.