VLC Player Coming to Android in Early 2011

If you are waiting for VLC come to the Android, you just have to wait a little bit more. Jean-Baptiste Kempf, lead developer of VLC, announced on Thursday to Gigaom that the first version of VLC for the Android will be released in early 2011.

VLC is a popular program for Windows, Mac, and Linux that allows users to watch almost any video or audio file out there (from .wmv to .rmvb to .iso). The program has also been ported to Apple iOS for iPhones, and iPads in late September of this year.

VLC’s lead developer said that the VLC team has been working on the Android version of VLC for months and initially it hit a roadblock due to the fact that Android’s “multimedia output libraries are in Java.” After some time, Google had since released a updated version of NDK (which allows developers to create apps in native code) and the VLC team has been using the new NDK capabilities to further build the Android app, which were the two basic modules for audio and video output.

Although most of VLC libraries has been ported to Android, VLC’s lead developer cautioned that issues with certain devices could push back the date of release (like fragmentation of Android’s devices).