This is part of an article series covering VLC’s Objective-C framework, which we provide to allow inclusion of all its features in third party applications as well as VLC for iOS and Apple TV. Previously published: Part 1: What is VLCKit and how does it work? How to use it? Part 2: Metadata handling. Today, we will discuss thumbnailing of video content. We need to differenciate two key aspects: saving still images of a currently playing video (snapshot) and previewing media stored somewhere without being played (thumbnail). While either way, VLCKit will open the resource, decode the bitstream and provide you with a image, performance and usability will differ. ...

10 days ago, we published VLC media player 3.0 for all platforms. It’s the first major release in three years and brings a huge number of features, improvements and fixes. Get an overview here and the full changelog there. For VLCKit, we improved performance and memory management, added new APIs and you get all improvements from the underlying libvlc including full support for decoding H264 and H265 using VideoToolbox in hardware. Instead of using all cores of your iPhones CPU at 100%, decoding a 4K video uses less than 20%. Further you can look at all aspects of a 360° video with touch gesture based controls, discover and browse shares on your network with UPnP, NFS, FTP, SFTP and SMB and more. As you remember, we published VLC for Apple TV in January 2016, but so far, we never made VLCKit available on tvOS. In addition to MobileVLCKit for iOS, we now introduce TVVLCKit for tvOS! For macOS, iOS and tvOS, VLCKit 3.0 is available through Cocoapods as a precompiled binary under the LGPLv2.1 license. You can find the source code on our website - contributions welcome! We are looking forward to all your feedback and the apps deploying VLCKit to deliver multimedia to their users. Do you want to learn more about integrating VLCKit? Have a look at the tutorials I wrote not too long ago ( Part 1, Part 2). So what did we change in VLCKit, API-wise?

Today, we are proud to announce VLC on the Apple TV. It’s a full port of VLC media player combined with platform specific features. VLC for Apple TV integrates with a plethora of devices and services on your local network and includes a custom way of casting files directly to the TV from your other computers using a web browser! Background Immediately after Apple announced the future of television, we started to develop for the new box and now it is finally ready to be published. This is the first app we release with the increased limit of 2000 TestFlight beta testers, who had access to our app since mid November and greatly influenced the result. We were excited about the amazing amount of feedback we received. ...

Today, we will release a new major version of VLC for iOS. Note that due to adapted review guidelines, it is branded “VLC for Mobile” on the iOS App Store now. We have been working on this update for the last few months, so it adds a lot of features: full iOS 9 support incl. split screen and iPad Pro re-written Apple Watch app for watchOS 2 system-wide search for content stored locally within the app using “CoreSpotlight” Touch ID support to unlock the app full support for Right-To-Left languages ...

Today, we will release version 2.6.0 of VLC for iOS adding support for Apple Watch. With Apple Watch, you can fully control VLC on iPhone, browse the library and retrieve info about stored or playing media items. Since playback control using Apple Watch allows you to start playback while the app is in background, we took the occasion to completely rework the playback process which culminated in the introduction of a mini player. This way, you can finally browse the media library or network services without interrupting playback. ...

Today, we released version 2.5.0 of VLC for iOS with a strong focus on cloud integration. We added support for iCloud Drive, box.com and OneDrive. As part of iCloud Drive, you can have access to any cloud storage enabled app on iOS 8 and later. For box.com and OneDrive, we added native support, which allows us direct streaming from the cloud without having the user download a media first. ...

After a 5 month hiatus and a couple of delays in between, we are very happy to release version 2.4.1 of VLC for iOS to the general public today. Please see our press release for cross-platform information. As an introductory remark, make sure to get the legitimate version of VLC. There are a number of clones on the iOS App Store right now, which violate both our copyright and our trademarks, include advertisement and usually charge $1 to $5 per download. We sent 39 DMCA take down notices against 48 apps over the cause of the last 12 months and in the end, we always succeeded. However, this can take up to 3 months, even for seemingly obvious violations. ...

Today, we will also a major new version of VLC for Mac OS X. For cross-platform changes, please have a look at the release notes and our press release. What’s new in VLC for Mac? Support for OS X Yosemite Completely re-written web plugin for Chrome, Safari and Firefox is back! Improved fullscreen behavior Continue playback where you left off Improved playlist adding a file size column and an option to increase the font size In addition to iTunes, Spotify can be paused on playback start New encryption and decryption modules for SSL based on OS X’s SecureTransport library for FTP and HTTP connections. This greatly improves speed and security. A lot of improvements in VLCKit for use in third party applications, notably Switched the code base to ARC and added support for Swift projects Support for HLS and HTTPS playback on iOS Improved thumbnailing Various new APIs for playlist handling, the equalizer, thumbnailing and meta data handling We are excited about this major update of VLC for Mac and hope that you’ll like it as much as we do.

This is part of an article series covering VLC’s Objective-C framework, which we provide to allow inclusion of all its features in third party applications as well as VLC for iOS and Apple TV. Currently published: Part 1: What is VLCKit and how does it work? How to use it? Part 3: snapshots and thumbnailing Today, we will discuss meta data processing. In VLCKit, every item you play is a VLCMedia object. For typical use cases, it can be created with an NSURL or an NSString containing a path. ...