VLC 1.5 - On the Road to Windows 10

It’s been a long time since we updated the VLC app on the Windows Store. Last update was released on May, 19th, and April 23rd on Windows Phone.
Today, we’re releasing an update on VLC for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. It has been optimized to run flawlessly on Windows 10.
This new version brings tons of changes and bugfixes, I will list only some of them.

A new name

The VLC app for Windows Store was previously called VLC for Windows 8 and is now called … VLC for Windows Store! Makes more sense.

Changelog : libvlc

Video output

VLC was using a Direct2D plugin for the video output. It was a Visual Studio project wrote in C++/CX. Performances and stability were really bad.
Steve Lhomme worked mainly on the Direct3D video output. It’s now sharing the same code between VLC for Desktop (Win32), and VLC for Windows Store (Desktop, tablet, phone). It is a huge improvement.
Steve then worked on the Hardware decoding and this new version includes our experimental code. It’s disabled by default as it’s still unstable but our internal betatesters clearly noticed the improvements coming on every nightly build.
We managed to play 720p on a Lumia 920, a 720p on a Lumia 720p, and a full HD mkv file on a Surface 2.

TagLib

That was hard as well because of the numerous and odd limitations of the WinRT platform. Now TagLib successfully reads the metadata of music and video files. It is also able to find the embedded album cover, but can’t find the cover if it’s in the same folder, because of the WinRT filesystem limitations.

libvlc updates

If you want to have a precise look at the changes made in VLC those past few months, you should have a look at the Jean-Baptiste Kempf blogposts he writes every week.

Also, we added the support for embedded SSA subtitles.

Changelog : frontend

There were hundreds of bugfixes, and some cool new features.

User Interface

VLC homepage, now showing music recommendations

Music Library, Artists view

The UI has been updated to match the new Windows 10 style. It’s also faster on the low-end devices like a Surface RT and Lumia 520,620 …
We added some pretty animations, and also a beta version of a Win2D component (thanks for the move to MIT license!) for the background slideshow.

Music library

We get the metadata from TagLib, which are more precise, and we know the difference between Artist and AlbumArtist.
There’s a new option “Add to current playlist”, to add an album or a track the playlist you’re currently playing.

Video library

Videos should resume where you left (was working with low success score on the previous version).
We also use TagLib to get the metadatas of your videos, as requested by our users.

Mini Player

Mini player

There’s a mini player! Click the button on the right of the repeat button. Works best on Windows 10, of course.

If you expand the mini player window, VLC displays the playlist/p>

Search

We rewrote the Search engine from scratch and it should be faster. It’s still a work in progress and we would like to hear your feedback.

More settings

Several users asked for more control. We’re giving you more control like the ability to change the default home page, user rich animations in the app, etc.

The Settings user interface has been simplified during the process. I hope you like it!

Updated Settings UI

DLNA

DLNA works better in this release.

Known issues

Audio

Audio may not work after playing some videos/songs. Steve Lhomme is trying to fix this and the fix should be available in the next update

Video

Hardware decoding doesn’t work; we’re still working on it, it’s experimental.

Where can I give feedback?

Here:
VideoLan bug tracker

I don’t like the TitleBar always shown on my Windows 8.1 device! How can I remove it?

We’ll add an option in the Settings to hide it in the next version, which should be available next week.

Where is the Windows Phone version?

Coming at the end of next week if Microsoft releases a new build to the Windows Insiders.