It’s no secret, we love VLC. If you own a PC or a Mac and you don’t have VLC… what are you doing? It’s free, it plays pretty much any video file you throw at it without complaint, if it was only a little prettier it would be perfection.
A month ago, Apple surprised us all by letting an iPad version of VLC through to the App Store, but the promise of multi format stable video was in reality a little disappointing. Looking unfinished, slightly clunky and with lots of accusations of instability, it just wasn’t the same app we’d grown to love on our desktops.
Now it has been rolled out to iPhone and iPod touch users, but is it any better? Very quick tests on an iPhone 3Gs running iOS 4.1 suggest VLC still has a way to go. The first video I loaded up refused to play because the iPhone was “too slow”. That was a good resolution AVI video clip, so I tried with a lower resolution FLV and it worked fine. But that’s not OK! If video has to be optimized at a certain resolution or size, VLC for iPhone needs to tell users, as experimentation is just irritating and ruins the much loved VLC experience.
In short – VLC on iOS is a nice idea, but needs some serious work done before it’ll win our hearts. Let’s hope it improves soon!
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