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At last, I had the time to start testing the app. (Had to go to raise my fishing nets from our lake and, then, pre-prepare the fish I've caught.)

The first and most important thing I'm writing a quick remark before posting the full review:

!!!both AC3 and DTS are supported!!!

That is, if you need AC3 (and even more importantly, DTS, which, currently, isn't supported by any AppStore player) support, hurry up, download and archive the IPA file before support for these codecs will be removed!! (It WILL be in the near future!)

How do you "download and archive the IPA file"?
 
At last, I had the time to start testing the app. (Had to go to raise my fishing nets from our lake and, then, pre-prepare the fish I've caught.)

The first and most important thing I'm writing a quick remark before posting the full review:

!!!both AC3 and DTS are supported!!!

That is, if you need AC3 (and even more importantly, DTS, which, currently, isn't supported by any AppStore player) support, hurry up, download and archive the IPA file before support for these codecs will be removed!! (It WILL be in the near future!)

libdca is a free library for decoding DTS Coherent Acoustics streams. The code is written by Gildas Bazin and was based on the a52dec project. It is released under the terms of the GPL license.

http://www.videolan.org/developers/libdca.html
 
libdca is a free library for decoding DTS Coherent Acoustics streams. The code is written by Gildas Bazin and was based on the a52dec project. It is released under the terms of the GPL license.

http://www.videolan.org/developers/libdca.html

It won't stop the DTS folks to force the removal of DTS support from the app. Exactly the same happened to all, previously DTS-capable players in the AppStore. This is why I've told everyone to quickly backup the IPA if DTS and AC3 are important.

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Also experiencing the distorted sound trying to playback AVI

Yup, it doens't properly support mp2 / mp3 audio tracks.
 
Download the app via iTunes/Mac.

Mac: User > Music > iTunes > iTunes Media > Mobile Applications > VLC 2.0.1.ipa

Thanks

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Here Sir,

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html

Binary
You can also get the binary from our servers instead of the App Store
:
http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc-iOS/2.0.1/vlc-iOS-2.0.1.ipa

and you can install using iFunbox for free,

http://i-funbox.com/ifunboxmac/

Thank you sir.
 
AVPlayer runs circles around VLC or any other player on the App Store...

Yup, now that I've finished testing, I agree: VLC is WAAAY worse than AVPlayer or nPlayer. Unfortunately, it's just a bit better than the initial (and very bad) 2010 version. Apart from DTS / AC3 playback, I in no way recommend it.

Let me present you all with a quick pros / cons list (I'll make this into a full article soon):

Pros

- DTS and AC3 support!!!
- Video filters, playback speed manipulation, and fine seeking.
- Acceptable SSA subtitle support. Note that it can't decode some kinds of subtitles. An example:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33448355@N07/9318494941/sizes/o/in/set-72157634699663151/

Pay special attention to the area, annotated by a red rectangle, in the upper right corner!

The same vertical subtitle is properly rendered by the desktop VLC:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33448355@N07/9321287756/sizes/o/in/set-72157634699663151/


Cons

- no hardware acceleration support for native formats
- furthermore, to make things even worse, the H.264 decoder is far slower than in top players. For example, the Monsters test video ( http://www.auby.no/files/video_tests/h264_1080p_hp_4.1_10mbps_dts_unstyled_subs_monsters.mkv ) can't be properly played back on even the currently fastest iDevices (iPhone 5/ iPad 4) – it's absolutely useless.
- no MKV remuxing (after all, it doesn't play any kind of video hardware accelerated)
- definitely worse MPEG2 1080i60 decoding support than in several other players
- incompatible with several audio formats; for example, MP3 (see the harry Potter test video http://www.auby.no/files/video_tests/h264_720p_hp_3.1_600kbps_aac_mp3_dual_audio_harry_potter.mkv ) and MP2 (European SD DVB audio track – an example is at )
- no Apple CC support (which was easy to predict as it doesn't use HW acceleration / decoding at all)
- very unstable – freezes / crashes VERY frequently
- no metadata displaying support
- no support for displaying more than one subtitle at a time
- when audio-only files are concerned, only OGG Audio (OGA) is supported – there's absolutely no support for WMA / WAV / FLAC / WV / APE files.
- impossible to resize / relocate / restyle textual subtitles
- no playlists, camera roll / iPod library access, filelist sorting, folders, file renaming

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But it is not free.

AVplayerHD / nPlayer don't cost much and, now that I've finished testing, I need to say you do yourself (if not anything else, then, your battery life - software decoding, even if one doesn't immediately realizes, consumes a LOT of power) a big favor by not bothering with VLC for iOS, at least as of the current (2.0.1) version.

It's only slightly better than the initial version released (and, then, removed from AppStore) in 2010. The latter was absolutely rubbish.
 
Not available yet on iTunes UK but will load direct to iPad

As of 13:00 today in the UK it still says "Not available yet on iTunes UK" but it seems to be loading just fine direct to my iPad3 from the App Store on the iPad - go figure! Really good news this is back. VLC is by far the most flexible and satisfactory media player. It seems to buffer much better than others when you only have a slow connection.
 
Really good news this is back. VLC is by far the most flexible and satisfactory media player. It seems to buffer much better than others when you only have a slow connection.

While it may buffer better than some other players (I haven't tested this yet - will do it too), playing back local (non-networked) files is definitely inferior to top AppStore players (nPlayer, AVPlayer(HD) etc.)
 
Won't stream from Ad-Free streams on Radioio

VLC for iOS unfortunately will not stream my Ad-Free subscription stream from Radioio properly - sounds absolutely horrible - barely recognisable as music. Strangely it works perfectly with VLC on my Mac, so I would say more work needs to be done on this app.
 
VLC for iOS unfortunately will not stream my Ad-Free subscription stream from Radioio properly - sounds absolutely horrible - barely recognisable as music. Strangely it works perfectly with VLC on my Mac, so I would say more work needs to be done on this app.

As I've explained above, VLC for iOS can't properly play back mp2 / mp3 audio. Radioio uses MP3 streaming; this is why it sounds awful.

For Radioio streams, use Safari or a decent mp3 streaming-capable app; for example, ooTunes. The latter automatically records everything, making it possible to later save the auto-records if you'd like to later listen to it again.

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Aaaand it's gone.

I managed to get it for both my european and american account in the last moment.

Wi-fi upload works really well

Yup, indeed seems to be gone from the US store. The DOlby / DTS folks were quite fast this time too ;) As I predicted some four hours ago.

It seems to be still present in the Finnish store here.

Nevertheless, as I've explained above, we don't lose much. This version only seems to be marginally better than the absolutely awful initial (2010) iOS version. I really can't think of usage areas when one would prefer it to much better-engineered (albeit commercial) tools like nPlayer.
 
Damn - missed it in the US store. Well, I still have the older version, so I'll be good there. I'm just thrilled that when they made it last time, they made it iPad friendly :D
 
Finally Got it in the Canadian App Store.

Lackluster to say the least. I was expecting some sort of File Management (List View) as well as Camera Roll access.

Dropbox access is nice but i found the download time to be way longer than if i downloaded from dropbox directly then opened in VLC.

BTW: @Menneisyys2 I appreciate the thorough testing. I'm assuming you were using the iPad 4 and iPhone 5?

Needs work for sure. Still Free and a 'backup' alternative to AVPlayerHD. Why would you delete it?
 
Cons

- furthermore, to make things even worse, the H.264 decoder is far slower than in top players. For example, the Monsters test video ( http://www.auby.no/files/video_tests/h264_1080p_hp_4.1_10mbps_dts_unstyled_subs_monsters.mkv ) can't be properly played back on even the currently fastest iDevices (iPhone 5/ iPad 4) – it's absolutely useless.

Don't want to say there are no better players, but I also tried this file on both an iPhone 5 and an iPad 4 and it runs smoothly without problems.
 
Yup, now that I've finished testing…

Thank you very much!


An example:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33448355@N07/9318494941/sizes/o/in/set-72157634699663151/

Pay special attention to the area, annotated by a red rectangle, in the upper right corner!

The same vertical subtitle is properly rendered by the desktop VLC:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33448355@N07/9321287756/sizes/o/in/set-72157634699663151/

Those photos are identical in my browser.
 
Seems to be alright so far, I've run into some audio distortion issues with AVI files (I think). Other than that it's pretty nice.
 
I was excited to play my ripped Blu-Ray MKVs at first, but then I realize the majority of them are bigger in size than my iPhone's internal storage offers.
 
Seems to be alright so far, I've run into some audio distortion issues with AVI files (I think). Other than that it's pretty nice.

See my AVI-related posts above: if the AVI has an MP2/3 audio track (the latter, along with AC3, is the most common, except for Canon camera AVI videos, where PCM is used), it won't be properly played back.
 
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