With just seven days to go before the end of their Kickstarter campaign, things are looking like the VLC app for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 will in fact become a reality. The Kickstarter page now shows that, as of this writing, it has raised over 90 percent of its £40,000 goal.
The Kickstarter page also has posted an update that goes over some of the more technical aspects of bringing VLC to Windows 8. They admit that bringing the popular video player to Windows 8 will have some "significant challenges" due to changes in the APIs. It added:
Other APIs, like sockets, were replaced by their COM interfaces counterpart (for instance Windows.Networking.Sockets). They are used to provide asynchronous interfaces for code running under WinRT. They got inspiration from mobile applications and the “always responsive” goal: a WinRT application should not use blocking code, and should go to sleep or wake up quickly if needed. With COM interfaces, the code polling the socket is executed in another process, and the data is provided through a callback. This changes a bit the usual networking code (connect-\>select-\>read-\>select\>…) and we need to write a large layer of compatibility code.
There is also the issue of actually distributing the app to Windows 8 users. While side loading has been discussed, it seems the major goal is to have VLC launched on Microsoft"s Windows Store. You can get more information about the VLC Windows 8 project in our recent interview with members of the team.
Source: VLC on Kickstarter | Image via VideoLAN