VLC Media Player To Start MoviePedia Soon

The free and therefore extremely popular VLC media player, which is sold under an open-source license, will soon be getting a completely revised interface and further improvements in the year of its 20th anniversary. In addition, ‘Moviepedia’ should start soon.

As Jean-Baptiste Kempf, who heads the VideoLAN project, stated in a conversation with the magazine Protocol, one wants to introduce a modernized surface with the upcoming version VLC 4.0. The developers modified the interface to freshen it up, Kempf said in the conversation. However, he has not yet given details of the planned changes.

VLC should be able to deliver web content

Kempf made it clear, however, that with the upcoming major update for VLC, among other things, they want to ensure that more online content is displayed directly in the app. But this should be done in a VLC-typical way. VLC gets extensions to obtain content from third-party providers, so that not every user is presented with the same catalogue of videos.

At the same time, Kempf indicates that there is definitely a possibility of displaying videos with advertising in order to create a little financial support for the VideoLAN project. The head of the project also stated that VLC will be introduced in a new version for the web, based on WebAssembly and JavaScript. This replaces the old web plug-in, which worked similarly to Flash and is no longer supported by most modern browsers.

In addition to the innovations relating to the VLC player itself, Kempf also announced a new project by the VideoLAN team called Moviepedia. It is supposed to be a kind of free counterpart to the IMDb operated by Amazon, i.e. a portal that provides information on countless films, series and actors. The portal is to be maintained by a community of authors who, similar to Wikipedia, can create entries and keep them up to date.

It is still unclear when the Moviepedia will be launched and when VLC 4.0 will be released.