Probably one of the most popular video players on both the desktop and mobile platforms is VLC because it can play almost anything. With Android TV slowly gaining traction in the smart TV platform market (although it still has a long way to go), it isn’t really surprising that the open source cross-platform multimedia player will eventually make its way there. The developers have released a preview version of the app, and despite the bugs and all, it looks pretty promising.
Ever since Google announced Android TV at last year’s Google I/O, fans of both the platform and VLC have probably been waiting for this eventuality. VLC’s open source platform lets developers catch up with almost all the different video formats that are out there and this will be a boon for Android TV which will primarily be used to watch movies, TV shows, and other kinds of videos. The folks over at Gigaom kindly gave us a peek at them playing around with the preview app, and basically, everything seems to be working for both audio and video files.
But of course this is still in the preview stage, there are still some things that need to be worked out. For instance, it still can’t access storage drives through the network, at least not yet. It will probably eventually do so, knowing these guys. But some cool things that it can do, aside from most of the features from the regular Android version, is integration with the interface and voice search of Android TV.
Geoffrey Metais, the developer of VLC, is definitely looking for feedback from early adapters, given that the Nexus Player is not easily available in France. If you want to try it out on your Android TV, you can download the preview APK here and sideload onto your device.
SOURCE: Gigaom
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