There aren’t many users that haven’t heard of the VLC media player. It’s free software and is highly portable, but is there an N900 port? There surely is.

Green screen, Maemo screenshooter can't capture video streams. But the video plays. Really.

Note: the port requires you to fetch all the dependencies, and it will chomp up around 45 mB of your memory. Since some of them aren’t well optified, you’d want at least 20 mB in your rootfs.

The VLC port doesn’t have a package in the official Maemo repos yet, but VideoLAN’s repo has all the packages you need. Go and add it, either via the Application Manager (Name: VLC; Address: http://downloads.videolan.org/videolan/maemo/; Distro: freemantle; Components: free), or via Xterm:

sudo gainroot

echo “deb http://downloads.videolan.org/videolan/maemo/ freemantle free” >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hildon-application-manager.list

After you got the repo installed, simply install VLC from the App Manager or run:

sudo gainroot

apt-get update

apt-get install vlc

After that, reboot and VLC is installed.

The port itself is fairly functional, although a bit unstable. I had a couple of crashes trying to open a video.

All the desktop functions are there, they work, and are put it a more tight menu, for better mobile integration. You know what to expect. The videos play smoothly as well.

And while I myself always preferred mplayer, VLC is a solid, well known player, and certainly is a nice addition to your app library.

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