VLC for Android has finally left beta

VideoLAN’s multi-talented VLC media player has taken a while to reach Android in finished form, long enough that the developers revived the iOS app in the meantime. At last, though, it appears to be ready for prime time. The team has updated VLC for Android to drop the beta tag, making it officially complete. That’s not entirely true in practice, mind you. The version notes still talk about previous fixes for Android 5.0 Lollipop and devices using newer ARMv8 processors, and Chromecast streaming support still isn’t here.

Among tech-savvy media fans, Video LAN Client (VLC for short) is easily one of the most popular video and audio players in the world. It’s available for every major desktop platform, and for almost two years, it’s been in beta for Android. Today the app has officially graduated to a 1.0 build, marking its formal exit from beta and a day of celebration for fans of flexible media playback on mobile devices. In other words: Good news, everyone!  Aside from graduating to a stable release, the 1.0 version of VLC fixes a few Android 5.0 bugs and issues that specifically affected devices with ARMv8 processors. It looks like Chromecast support, which was announced back in June, still isn’t baked in. Hopefully that will be coming in a future release. At the moment the app seems to be running just fine on my Nexus 6, though of course older devices might have trouble depending on their hardware and the complexity of the files with which you use them. VLC supports an insane amount of both audio and video formats.