VLC For Android May Arrive In Early 2011

dkd903 writes "The development of an Android client for VLC has been going on for months now, but it has been slowed down by the fact that Android's multimedia output libraries are in Java. VLC itself is based on C and so translating them to Java is difficult and takes time. With the newer Android NDK, however, using native codes for Android apps has been becoming easier. So, the VLC developers have developed two basic modules for audio and video output based on the new NDK and most of the VLC libraries have been ported to Android."

Re:Video on mobile phones

[0123456]

This isn't going to use battery at all, especially since VLC's codecs aren't hardware accelerated...

And in Java, which is well-known for its efficient support of complex bit-twiddling algorithms.

Android does have a C/C++

[EEPROMS]

support so I dont have a clue what the VLC guys are going on about... more info here [android.com]

Re:codec support

[SuricouRaven]

VLC gets it's codec support from a selection of libraries, primarily libavcodec. There isn't much it won't play. I've thrown everything from old realmedia to quicktime to mpeg to x264 in mkv container with vorbis audio at VLC, and it's all worked.

Re:Video on mobile phones

[Simon Brooke]

You absolutely do NOT want a garbage collector on a mobile device with limited memory and CPU power.

This is just one of the many things that Apple got 101% right in iOS.

My mobile phone [htc.com] has over six thousand times the compute power and over a million times the memory of the first computer I worked on [wikipedia.org], and that supported 18 concurrent users. More than that, my mobile phone has over five hundred times the compute power and one hundred times the memory of the first dedicated LISP workstation [wikipedia.org] I worked on, and that had a full GUI and generational garbage collection. The idea that modern phones have limited memory or limited CPU power is an idea which only beginners or amateurs could possibly believe.

Back at the beginning of the automobile age, cars were so primitive that they didn't have automatic oil pumps. If the driver didn't remember to keep pumping oil, the engine would seize. We no longer think that's good engineering. Nowadays, our cars have automatic oil pumps, which use a tiny fraction of the engine's power to prevent it happening. Back at the very beginning of the computer age, software systems were so primitive that they didn't have automatic memory management. If the programmer didn't remember to keep freeing memory, the memory system would silt up and the machine would freeze. Do you really think that's good engineering?