VLC media player for Windows 8/RT greenlit by Microsoft, a WP8 port coming too

You know VLC, right - the cross-platform media player that runs everything thrown at it. That is why we were thrilled to hear that the VLC team has launched a Kickstarter campaign for porting the player to Windows 8/RT. Given the lack of a comprehensive video player in the Windows Store, this is certainly great news, especially for RT tablet owners, as Win 8 can just run the x86 versions.

To top it all off, now the VLC crew announced that they've collected north of $20,000 so far, and are branching out into porting the player to Windows Phone 8 as well.

It turned out that, due to the common kernel, writing the code for WP8 wouldn't be as hard as they thought, and they even contacted Microsoft for help. The boys from Redmond were actually thrilled by the idea, and started helping the developers:

We've been in touch with Microsoft representatives, who are thrilled about our endeavor and ready to collaborate with us. They are looking into ways of supporting us directly through non-financial matters, notably hardware, technical and design help. This is great news.

This actually resolves many of the concerns that initial backers at Kickstarter had, about the legality of the project, since we know what kind of video players land stock for Microsoft's newest operating systems. It turns out that the GNU GPL licences are compatible with Redmond's requirements, though, and the team even hopes to start distributing their codecs directly through the Windows app store.