Rinnegatamante shows off video playback with Lua Player Plus on the Vita – Better video player coming soon?

Rinnegatamante has given various contributions to the PSVita scene and he even ported over Lua Player Plus to the PSVita with the help of some other developers. Lua Player Plus is a powerful Lua interpreter with various features, including the ability to output 3D graphics via the GPU, and now it’s going to get video playback functionality too.

What exactly is Lua Player Plus and why is the ability to play back video important?

Lua Player Plus is a Lua interpreter for the PSVita with various features such as:

• Support for 2D/3D rendering via the GPU; this makes LPP the easiest way to code a homebrew containing 3D graphics for the Vita.
• The ability to play back sound in various formats.
• A built-in FTP server for debugging.
• Support for various picture formats.
• Many other features such as a built-in rescaler to make porting homebrew written with LPP for the 3DS to the Vita much easier. Vita Hangman is an example of an LPP game for the 3DS being ported to the Vita.

Lua Player Plus

Thanks to Lua Player Plus, we were able to get various great pieces of software such as Pro Camera Vita (an app by VitaHEX that’s much better than the official Camera app for the Vita), EUCLOID and Flappy Bird among others.

With the ability to play videos, a homebrew that a good number of us desire may become possible. The stock video player isn’t great as you have to either import your files via QCMA or MediaImporter (a homebrew utility) which both make the process longer than it needs to be. A media player (like VLC which plays back both videos, audio and has various other abilities) written in Lua could make the PSVita a great console for watching series on the go especially with the SD2Vita which can take cards up to 200GB. A great video player would also be useful on the PSTV as it could make for a great Android box replacement as you could connect big pen drives/external hard drives to it to store and watch your favourite shows/movies.

Possible developers that may create a better media player for the Vita are Rinnegatamante and VitaHEX, who’s developed quite a few useful utilities, such as Notepad Vita, with LPP.

The video codec used will be H264 (one of the most common video codecs) and Vorbis will be the audio codec although this may change.

Conclusion

Video playback functionality isn’t completely ready just yet so that means that you’ll have to wait a bit till you actually see a better media player for the PSVita. That being said, someone will probably step up to the plate and make us a more useable media player, even if it only lets you to directly watch videos rather than have to import them manually. Other than a media player, the ability to play back video could be used to make better cutscenes in homebrew games.

Source: https://twitter.com/Rinnegatamante/status/912063688835784704

Audio/Video codec information: https://twitter.com/Rinnegatamante/status/912063688835784704