I doubt that the whole thing would build from within the official Maemo infrastructure. The VLC build system requires network access to fetch external sources. This is fixable, but it needs tedious work.

On top of that, VLC needs python-xcbgen. In the current Fremantle SDK, python-xcbgen is only available as source code and needs to be built and installed manually. So it's impossible to fill the VLC build-dependencies as is with the public Fremantle SDK. Again, this could be worked around, but it takes time.

Last and most importantly, I have to question the value of submitting to Extras a package that does not have a user interface. You can really only use it from the OSSO terminal at the moment. The old N8x0 Hildon UI partially works, but it's ugly, buggy, limited and unfriendly. The normal Qt4 somehow get stuck during the startup. This seems like a bug in the Qt4 run-time. Due to this bug, I do not know how usable the normal VLC Qt4 UI would be on N900.

It's a fairly general problem with VLC that it's ported to a bunch of portable systems (iPAQ, QNX, WinCE were done before by other people), but nobody ever bothers to write a user interface I'm sorry but I have limited time and no expertise in UI design myself.

I got the Qt4 UI to work now. But the usability is bad and it makes VLC slow I will see what I can do. But generally, until one of the VLC Qt UI developer gets his hands off an N900, I think this is a bit stuck

Hello,
I made a mockup of how VLC could look on the N900, its just half an hour in photoshop and googling

Playing a Movie:

Tapping the Screen:

Tap the menu button:


The menu items i used is just copypasta from the Mac version (except, the "Show in Finder" item)..


This is how i hope VLC will look, just with the user interface a bit optimized, Like the same font everywhere and my menu button was just an edit of the task switcher button. Oh and I forgot a way to exit the app without the task switcher.

One thing to note, is that my N900 will not arrive to my house before next week, so ive only seen screenshots and videos of the gui online, if im making another mockup its using the freemantle sdk of course

Any new developments in this?

Looks nice. Lets hope that someone implements that

Some notations in my point of view and I understand that you just made it quickly

- Play/stop bar should popup from bottom without spacing.
- Seekbar and volumebar are too small for fingers also full screen button
- Time left and running time.
- Where is close button?

It´s nice mockup!

Sorry, I did it before i actually got my device...
though I would do it slightly different now.
Ill make another one when I have some spare time

how is this coming along

Latest changelog dated 27/5/2010.

Maemo port:
* Multiple improvements for N900 compliance and efficiency
* Support for HW accelerated video decoding on N900
* Improvements to the maemo/hildon interface

Full changelog and source are here:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/1.1.0-RC.html

What does this exactly mean??

It means this: http://www.remlab.net/files/vlc/fremantle/ if you don't know how to install it you probably don't want to install it. You have been warned.