Media Players We may soon learn how far Apple is willing to go to accommodate Flash on the iPad under its new “relaxed” developer policies — or at least how much pressure it’s really feeling from the FTC — with the submission of a VLC media player app by French developers at Applidium. According to a press release issued Wednesday, the app is pending approval and could be available next week “If everything goes well.”
Apple has only recently begun approving third-party media players for the iPad but all of those to have become available up to now are paid apps and support only selected video formats. The VLC player, however, is an open-source project, and Applidium said it intends to offer the app for free.
More to the point, the VLC player can play back video encoded in virtually any format you can throw at it, including, of course, Flash. While Apple’s new rules allow developers to create apps using Flash tools and then cross-compile it into iOS-compatible machine code, they stop short of saying apps are free to support Flash video.
Applidium has been coy so far regarding Flash support in the new app. In an email to ReadWriteWeb, co-founder Romain Goyet said, “This unfortunately I cannot answer right now (you guess why 🙂 ).”
Indeed we can.
Beyond the question of Flash support, Apple also may be weighing possible blow-back from major content owners (not least including Disney, in which Steve Jobs in the largest individual shareholder). While most media companies are sitting on mountains of Flash-encoded video they’d love to be able to exploit on Apple devices without having to re-encode everything, they’re not necessarily fans of the VLC player’s other capabilities.
In addition to playing Flash content, the VLC player will effortlessly play a Blu-ray rip in .MKV, a DVD rip in H.264 or a camcorded movie in XVid. Approving a VLC app for the iPad would effectively open the Apple tablet to a lot of BitTorrent content the studios would just as soon not be there.
What could save them is the lack of support for removable media on the iPad. The only way to get video onto the device, apart from streaming it live, is to sync it from a PC via iTunes. Since iTunes doesn’t recognize .MKV files or many of the other formats the VLC player is capable of playing, it’s not clear how users would get most BitTorrent content onto the device.
Tune in next week for answers. Same Bat time, same Bat channel.
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