Hands On: VLC Beta for Android

The VLC Media Player is universally acknowledged as perhaps the most popular cross platform media player out there and now it is available on the most popular mobile platform, Android, albeit in a very buggy beta form. While, the app is available on the Google Play store, don’t expect it to run any full movies at 1080p as in out testing it struggled to play even a single minute of high definition content without any jitters and stutters.
Apart from playing a plethora of formats for video, the VLC media player for Android also doubles as a very capable audio player. From the get go, the app UI has been segregated in two panes – Video and Audio. The Audio player element of the player also readily supports album art.
That said, the VLC Beta is not meant to be a daily driver as it currently only supports hardware decoding with limited hardware and performance optimizations are missing. VLC also notes that the basic UI of the app could also change in the final version, so this app in its current state is far from perfect.