Hey - bumping this thread - I think adding support for the HAP codec would be an incredible thing to add to VLC. It is widely used in the live entertainment industry on a wide variety of apps and media players but doesn't have a lot of support outside of those. There is currently no native player of hap - it's easy to encode, but harder to get something to view the video and VLC would be great for this.
HAP is super fast for playback due to its GPU decoding and is also one of the only currently available video formats that can play files larger than 8K. It's also open source and cross platform.
Vidvox (
www.vidvox.net ), the creators, are super great people and I'm sure they would be willing to help out in any way they could.