Kickstarter

News and Excuses

I must start this post by sharing some excuses of not doing enough updates lately.The main reason is that we've been mostly under-water with the current development, that took most of our time.

News and report

The good news is that we have had tremendous progress...

The bad is that we have still a bit of work to do before sharing it on the store, as I will explain soon.

Pictures
But first, the current pictures:
Current start screen

Fully working playback

Technical update
If you followed closely, our main work, in addition to the UI, was to fight and replace the forbidden symbols not allowed on Windows App Store mode.

We've been quite efficient at that, working closely with Mingw-w64 project and GCC developers.

The biggest result is that we have now cut down 90% of our symbols, that are forbidden on Metro Mode.

We mostly did this by: 

• replacing our forbidden calls with newer authorized equivalent calls, 
• modifying gcc and Mingw-w64, 
• writing new code in a special library of ours, 
• writing dummy functions, 
• disabling VLC code that would not work on the Metro platform, 
• moving VLC to MSVCRT 11.0, moving all the VLC codebase to UNICODE and WideChars to fit the new requirements.

We did also a lot of minor things to help the integration of libVLC and VLC in this modern platform.

What are we working on now:

We are now mainly working on 2 things:

• make VLC work with MSVCRT 11.0 without crashing 
• write headers and C/C++ code to access the new fashion of COM APIs in which WinRT is written in.

Dear backers,

This is the end of our Kickstarter campaign.

Just one thing: thank you!

We'll keep you posted about our developments very quickly!

Jean-Baptiste & Felix for the VLC for Windows 8 team.

Dear backers,

We have come a long way and we are finally there. It's 24 hours to go for our Kickstarter campaign. So far, more than £45,000 were pledged by almost 3000 backers.

This is a tremendous success and we are very pleased about it. Thanks so much!

In the last week, we've prepared our project management tools, collected hardware and software needs for the developers who will work on VLC for Windows 8, RT and Phone and set up our major development milestones. We will start right-away as soon as the campaign is over.

Our fulfillment team is set up, too, so we can ship all the goodies on time. Thanks again and you'll hear back from shortly!

Jean-Baptiste & Felix for the VLC for Windows 8 team.

Dear backers,

This evening, we crossed our goal of £40,000. Thanks again for your generous support and for allowing us to realize our project!

Any further money coming in will greatly speed up the availability of our port of VLC to Windows Phone 8, since it will allow us to parallelize the workload of the ports to Windows 8 / RT and Phone.

Furthermore, we would like to propose a few additional features, on which we will be working full-time after the initial release is done and as long as money is left:

• camera input support — This allows you to record anything your connected cameras can see and to stream it live where ever you like.
• DLNA client and server integration — Play media stored on DLNA capable servers on your Windows RT tablet or Windows Phone — Stream everything VLC can play on your tablet or Windows 8 PC to your DLNA capable devices (Xbox, ...).
• integration with locally attached devices for media playback and synchronization
• Smartglass support

Thanks again for all your feedback and your support. We are looking forward to go all-in on this project!

Jean-Baptiste & Felix for the VLC for Windows 8 team