VLC is one of the best media players available for Linux, Mac and Windows. Its popularity is due to the fact that it plays almost every media file type you throw at it. A few months ago, VLC for iOS was released (followed by some controversy) and, we Android users were also asking for the the Android version.

GigaOM talked to Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of VLC, and according to them the android version of VLC may be finished by early 2011.

The development of an Android client for VLC has been going on for months now, but it has been slowed down by the fact that Android’s multimedia output libraries are in JAVA. VLC itself is based on C and so translating them to JAVA is difficult and takes time.

With the newer Android NDK, however, using native codes for Android apps has been becoming easier. So, the VLC developers have developed two basic modules for audio and video output based on the new NDK and most of the VLC libraries has been ported to Android.

However Jean-Baptiste Kempf warns that not everything is so clear-cut right now. Android’s device fragmentation could still play spoilsport and delay it further. If everything goes well, we will see VLC for Android in early 2011.