Jordan O'BrienVLC is one of the world’s most popular video players, largely thanks to the fact that it’s open sourced and can support pretty much any video or audio format that you throw at it. In fact, it’s so popular that the software has eclipsed three billion downloads, and to celebrate the firm behind VLC, VideoLAN, has announced that AirPlay support is coming.
The mobile app for VLC has already packed in many features that can’t be found in other media players, but the addition of AirPlay has been a major omission for years. With its addition, it could finally mean that users will be able to beam content playing on the VLC mobile app to an Apple TV – something currently not possible. That’s despite the fact that the software already supports Google’s competing Chromecast protocol.
Just like Chromecast support, however, VLC plans to add AirPlay support to all of its platforms. That means users of an Android smartphone will be able AirPlay videos directly to an Apple TV. When the update does land, it would make VLC one of the few Android apps to actually support AirPlay support, and it would most certainly be the biggest name to offer the functionality.
Support for AirPlay comes after the firm recently added compatibility for HDR videos in AV1, an emerging video format. It doesn’t just want to be the video player that supports every format, however. VideoLAN has ambitions to offer give users all the features they could possibly want from a media player – including native support for VR videos when played on the company’s VR app.
In addition to all the new functionality updates, the next major version of VLC is promising to bring playback improvements in scaling and video quality of HDR video files. There’s no word on when that update will arrive or whether AirPlay will be part of version 4.0, although VideoLAN admits that support is currently planned for V4.