According to VLC developer Hugo Beauzée-Luyssen, the Xbox version of the media player has been submitted to the Windows Store. If accepted, users will see the app in their downloads very soon.
#VLC for #XboxOne has been submitted to the store, hopefully it will land in your living rooms in a few days!
— Hugo Beauzée-Luyssen (@beauzeh) October 3, 2016
VLC has been around for over fifteen years and is entirely free. The player is particularly useful for its support for a huge variety of file formats. This means that the player can even play some videos as they are downloading or is they are damaged.
It also allows users to fine-tune a variety of factors. For example, saturation, sharpness, audio equalization and more can all be changed without having to adjust settings for the entire display or audio output.
VLC UWP Features
The Xbox version of VLC won't have much more features than UWP on desktop, but the developer has confirmed background music support. It also brings the following advantages over Win32:
- “Automatic subtitles download from the Internet
- Cortana (experimental):
- Search in the library
- Control the playback
- Playlist creation“
- Equalizer
- UPnP/DLNA
- SMB/CIFS
- FTP/NFS
- Web Browsing
- Continuum support:
- Basic Continuum scenarios : docking
- Hybrid scenarios : control VLC running on your XBOX from your W10 mobile phone.
- Updated UI to match the Windows 10 style
- Choose your own accent color : VLC color or Windows chosen accent-color
- Reworked video player – easier access to VLC options, such as resizing, spu/audio delay, subtitles and audio tracks selection
- Picture in Picture mode – browse your collection and the video plays on the bottom-right corner
- Chromecast support
- Dark or light theme following your Windows (on Anniversary update) global settings
- Windows 10 live tiles and notifications”
It's not yet clear how many of these will come to Xbox, but we assume that most of (if not all) of the desktop functionality will be there. It's worth noting that this version doesn't support DVD or Blu-rays, so it's best to use the default player for those.
Microsoft would have to be crazy to deny VLC's Store application, so we recommend keeping an eye out over the next couple of days.
You can find more information about the UWP version on the blog of Thomas Nigro.