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The popular media player app VLC is coming to Android TV: VLC developers have released a preview version that already looks pretty neat — here’s a first look.
| Previously on Cord Cutters: |
|---|
| This is Android TV on the new Nexus Player |
| 4SeTV lets you watch four live TV channels at once |
| My review of Tablo, a DVR for over-the-air TV |
| How to make your Chromecast work in a hotel room |
| An in-depth first look at Amazon’s Fire TV |
| First look at the Mohu Channels, a connected TV tuner for cord cutters |
| Subscribe to Gigaom’s YouTube channel so you don’t miss any future episode. |
Show notes for this episode:
- VLC for Android TV isn’t yet available on Google Play. Adventurous users can download the preview APK here, but beware: The app needs to be sideloaded.
- Don’t know what VLC is? Here’s VLC’s main website.
- Interested in personal media playback on Android TV, but need more bells and whistles? Then check out Plex.
- Here’s our previous Android TV coverage.
Is VLC on Android TV a game changer, or just a nice add-on? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!
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I’d like to see this come out for my samsung smart t.v.
The issue with something like VLC is that it has so many features. That’s great on the computer but could be problematic on a platform designed for simplicity of use in a ‘lean back’ interface.
What would be idea would be if I could make my settings on the computer and then load them, via a saved profile or some kind of network visibility or something, onto my Android TV device/app.
It’s nice in any event. The most interesting thing though is that clearly the APIs are there and functional for third parties to integrate voice search and notifications, which drive the front page stuff on Android TV.
So – why isn’t Netflix up to speed here? And where is HBOGo?
I expect they’ll be along and caught up. Especially by the time the various televisoins launch with this on board.
The real problem at the end will probably be Amazon Prime Instant Video, which Amazon has clearly decided to withhold in an effort to buoy its own ecosystem. That might work for them given the awards they won the other night for content. For myself I didn’t take them up on extending my Prime trial recently because I’m not buying a special hardware option from them to watch their content. Especially not when they are running on a skinned Android to begin with.
Well, what makes VLC such a valuable asset (at least on computers) is that this player includes many codecs for playback of multiple media file formats. If this player for Android also includes the codecs, it would be a better alternative for local media playback and would not need a separate PLEX media server for transcoding of file formats for playback on PLEX clients.