Where would we be without open-source software and the talented developers who ply their skill on them? Well we’ve got another treat from the open-source goodie bag with CVPCS, an Android dev, releasing a pre-alpha of VLC media player for Android devices. Alright so it’s not an official app of the best, most versatile, media player in the universe but it is the next best thing.

Although CVPCS isn’t providing any support for the app because it’s such an early build, he his making his VLC app available to download. Because there are so many Android devices out there, you cannot have a universal app for all of them. So CVPCS has created two versions of the app, NEON and NO-NEON, based on processor types.

To find out which category your processor belongs to, you’ll need a file manager to locate the file “/proc/cpuinfo”. Open that file and you’ll see something like this:

Processor                            : ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
processor                            : 0
BogoMIPS                           : 1597.74

Features                              : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3
CPU implementer            : 0×41
CPU architecture              : 7
CPU variant                        : 0×1
CPU part                              : 0xc09
CPU revision                      : 2

Hardware                            : mapphone_CDMA
Revision                               : 0000
Serial                                     : 0000000000000000

Check the Features line for ‘neon’. If it’s there, then your device supports NEON extensions. If it’s not, then you’ll have to use the NO-NEON variant of VLC. Download VLC here and be sure to check out the full instructions.

Once again, this is a pre-release version so there will be bugs and missing features. Hopefully the developer will keep working on it and update all the required features and make this the best media player on Android.