VLC 3.0 ‘Ventinary’ is available for Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Android TV, Windows RT, Windows Phone, Windows 10 Mobile, Xbox One, Linux and more.
Popular media player, VLC is now being updated to v3.0. Called ‘Ventinary’, the new versions brings a lot of new features and functions to the player including support for Chromecast, and more. It also activates hardware decoding by default and supports 10-bit HDR. You can check out the entire changelog by clicking here. The new update is available for Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Android TV, Windows RT, Windows Phone, Windows 10 Mobile, Xbox One, Linux and more.
The support for Chromecast is arguably the highlight of VLC 3.0. In a separate post, VLC developer Geoffrey Métais explains that bringing the feature was not an easy task, which is why it look so long for the feature to finally arrive. Further, they also had to design workarounds to get the function to feature as intended.
“Chromecast is not designed to play local video files: When you watch a Youtube video, your phone is just a remote controller, nothing more. Chromecast streams the video from youtube.com. That’s where it becomes complicated, Chromecast only supports very few codecs number, let’s say h264. Google ensures that your video is encoded in h264 format on youtube.com, so streaming is simple. With VLC, you have media of any format. So VLC has to be a http server like youtube.com, and provide the video in a Chromecast compatible format. And of course in real time, which is challenging on Android because phones are less powerful than computers,” Métais states.
The developer also added that the function will use a lot of the device’s CPU and battery power, as such, the support for Chromecast should be considered beta for now.
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