VLC for Windows Store 1.8

AKA probably one of the last releases before we start working 100% on the Windows 10 version.

This new version brings several new features, for you, for the developers, and for us, so it’s quite a big release in many ways.

For you

• Translation system done !

  • French language added, many others to come soon after this release
• Artist biographies are now saved
• Users can send feedback to help us improve the app! More about this below in the “For us” section.

• Added a (still work-in-progress) context menu in the video player, to reproduce the legacy VLC experience for desktop users who love the right-click.
• Custom accent color feature !

BTW, the first color is #ff8800 (Official VLC color), and the three others are from Zune.

• Several buttons and texts are now bigger, easier to read on phones (see pictures below)
• Pivot headers look like Pivot headers (seriously, that’s important for WP users, so I changed the behavior)

Before (Lumia 1520)

Now (Lumia 1520)

• Slideshow updated with blur animations
• Added Video Player zoom options : Best Fit (the current zoom), Vertical Zoom (new), Horizontal Zoom (new)
• Update Video Player with some nice animations (tell us what you think of them!), and the controls disappear after 3 seconds
• Some settings are now synced between your devices, such as the colors (between Windows phones and Windows phones, and between Windows and Windows, not Windows phone between Windows for now unfortunately)
• Windows 10 Mobile handsets now use the W10 API to get the songs in the Music library, which is what we used since W8.1, and is way faster than the WP8.1 API.
• Fixed many bugs reported by our users, here are some of them
  • Fixed duplicate CurrentTrack in the Playlist (caused to have two highlighted tracks)
  • Fixed crash at launch when another app was sending a Stream that was considered by WinRT as a StorageFile
  • A change in the LastFM API made VLC to download the low-res version of your artist pictures. Fixed !
  • Slideshow is paused when the app is in the background
  • Crashes at first launch when indexing and getting video thumbnails
• Minor UI fixes, such as margins and colors fixes

For the developers

A new vlc:// protocol

WinRT developers can open VLC and ask to do stuff programmatically, using the vlc:// protocol. In v1.8, there’s only one action available : open stream. It takes three different patterns:

• vlc://openstream/?from=useraction

  • VLC opens and shows a TextBox, and users can write or paste a URL.

• vlc://openstream/?from=url&url=YOUR_URL

  • VLC opens a plays the URL given in the url parameter

• vlc://openstream/?from=clipboard

  • VLC opens the URL found in the clipboard

  /!\ Warning : Clipboard APIs aren’t available on WP8.1, so this one works with Desktops apps only. As Ginny Caughey said on Twitter, it will be available on mobile once the app uses UWP tools.

More actions to come ! Ask us, this one has been made because someone asked us on Twitter.

Honestly, the protocol is not recommended for production yet, but you can start implementing in your apps and we’ll be ready for the next update in the coming weeks.

For us

We receive your feedbacks and logs in an app I made so we can easily see what’s going wrong on your machine. We do not retrieve personal information that could help us to identify you (because we don’t care who you are, apart a kind user helping us with your feedback ;) ).

The logs contains actions you made in the app (so we can reproduce the bug), and metadatas about your video (deep, raw informations about the codec, the hardware decoding system used, the accuracy of the frames displayed, any warning from the Direct3D video output, etc).

Right now, our internal tool looks like this :

Of course it’s a UWP app, which means it also runs on phones and we can read your feedbacks even when AFK :)

What we’ve done on the UWP Port

Tim Miller started the work on the Windows 10 port.

• Drag and drop files support
• Context menu for the hamburger button (instead of the current ugly work-around I did on the Windows 8.1 port)

Thank you for reading !