In late December, the Kickstarter campaign to help fund a Windows 8 app for the popular free VLC media player ended successfully, as the team raised a total of £47,056 (just over $76,000). There's been only one development update for the Windows 8 VLC app since that time, however, and that update was just for the Kickstarter backers.
Since its been over two months after the end of the Kickstarter campaign, Neowin decided to contact the VideoLAN team to get an update. We received the following response from team member Jean-Baptiste Kempf:
So, the development is still under heavy work. So far, we have playback of all the files of the desktop version, in a correctly performing way, without too much speed drawbacks. The basic UI is working, but a lot of work is yet to be done there, like on Android, to polish it :)
As far as the main work, which is to make it compatible with the Windows Store restrictions, we are still blocked by technical difficulties and we don't know how to fix them, and the lack of external help makes it quite difficult. We probably will send a beta to our backers, this month, as we had promised.
While the news of the backers getting a beta version of the app sometime this month is good news, it's a bit troubling to hear that the VideoLAN team is still dealing with the restrictions that Microsoft has set up for the Windows Store. Hopefully they will find a way around these problems or perhaps get some help from Microsoft itself.
Image via VideoLAN
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