The team at VideoLan who make the wonderful open source VLC media player have been busy. After releasing beta support for Chromecast in v2.5 late last month, they’ve announced v3.0 is going live with stable Chromecast support and much more.
In an announcement post on their blog, VideoLan have outlined the major features for Vesion 3.0 which include:
- Chromecast
- VLC everywhere
- Playlist files
- Features Catch-Up
- Delete is back
- Fast seek
- Subs (not) auto-loading
The VLC team has also expounded why Chromecast support has taken so long -it’s because they don’t use Google Play Services, instead choosing to build their own Chromecast stack support. They did this to maintain the 100% open source integrity of VLC – Google’s Chromecast stack isn’t open source – and it’s also why there is no voice actions for VLC (except on Android Auto, but we’ll get to that).
So, with VLC 3.0, support for VLC is now available on DeX, Chromebooks and Android auto, as well as on your Android device.
The Chrome OS support is only for devices supporting Android apps, and it looks like (thankfully for safety) Android Auto is only for audio files. The Android Auto interface is simplified, and you can ask it to “play Daft Punk (with VLC)” and Assistant will load it up. For Samsung Galaxy owners, DeX docks is supported which will also be important with the Galaxy S9 launch only weeks away.
Also coming back in V3.0 (it was out in 2.5) is the option to parse playlists, so you can load up your .m3u files again and show your playlists. You can also delete files from external media like USB and SD cards in V3.0.
There’s also improvements to Fast Seek when scrubbing through Videos and fixes for subtitles not loading.
The update is apparently live in Google Play, with the date updated field listing Feb 9th, the same day the VLC blog post went up, so if you’re a VLC fan check it out.
