VLC v3.0 brings support for Google Chromecast and more

VLC media player has just got a new update and the new version brings in some exciting new features. VLC now comes with v3.0 version number and is dubbed as 'Ventinary'. While the new version brings a lot of new features and functions to the player one key feature that has been added is that VLC now gets a support for Chromecast.

If you are interested you can find the entire changelog on VLC's blog post. The new update is for systems running on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Android TV, Windows RT, Windows Phone, Windows 10 Mobile, Xbox One, Linux and more. Interestingly, VLC 3.0 can also be downloaded and run on Windows machines running Windows XP, Android devices on Gingerbread 2.3, and iOS devices on iOS 7.

However, today we will talk about the new Chromecast feature which is arguably the highlight of VLC 3.0. Having said that, the developers had to work rigorously to add this new feature and VLC Android developer Geoffrey Métais has further explained that the difficult part about Chromecast support was converting local media files to play nice with Google's preferred format.

"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 an h264 format on youtube.com, so streaming is simple," Métais stated.

"With VLC, you have media of any format. So VLC has to be an 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," he added.

Meanwhile, the developer has revealed that the new feature might consume a lot of the device's CPU and battery power. Further Chromecast support will only work on Android and Chromebooks for now. Notably, support for Chromecast could be considered beta for now.