VLC For Windows 8 Beta Incoming

The Windows 8 version of the ever-popular VLC Player — complete with a Modern touch-optimized user interface — is one of the most anticipated software for Microsoft’s latest platform.

It was only a few months back the team behind it (VideoLAN) announced a Kickstarter campaign to help fund an effort to bring the media player to Windows 8, RT and Windows Phone 8. Needless to say the campaign was a smash hit and fans of the media player rejoiced when development went underway.

The developers estimated a timeframe of three months at least, with near final preview versions set to be released sometimes around March.

And now they have confirmed that a beta version of the app was likely to be released very soon for those that donated in the Kickstarter campaign. The final build is also coming along quite nicely:

“We have done some of the work, but we still have a huge amount of work to do, notably on threads and Winsock reimplementation.”

While the coders have made a lot of progress, writing for the RT platform is something that is taking a lot of time. A member of the team Jean-Baptiste Kempf already validated this in a recent blog post. But that is to be expected with the new platform and its ARM architecture.

For those of you interested in the gritty technical details, information on the current status is available on the developer’s website here, where he goes into intimate specifics on the port job.

Expect more news for you as soon as a beta version of VLC for Windows 8 floats up.