Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

VLC Launches On Chrome OS Thanks To Android Port

Posted by timothy on from the early-birthday-present-to-me dept.

An anonymous reader writes: VideoLAN today launched VLC, the world's most used media player, for Chrome OS. You can download the new app, which is a port of the VLC version for Android, from the Chrome Web Store. Chrome OS was one of the last desktop operating systems for which VLC was not available (the media player exists for Windows, OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS/2, Haiku/BeOS, and ReactOS). Yet Chrome OS wasn't an easy operating system to support, as VLC is a native application on all platforms (it uses low-level APIs to output video, audio, and gain access to threads) built using mostly C and C++. Writing VLC in JavaScript and other Web technologies, as Chrome OS requires, is not an easy task by any stretch.

2 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. 95% of code from the Android version by iampiti · · Score: 4, Informative

    From TFA: Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC) makes it easy to make Android apps work on Chrome OS. "“The ARC solution was a blessing, and helped us to recycle 95 percent of the Android code and optimizations".
    Also, I don't know why the author decided to include ReactOS in the list of supported OSs since there's no special version of VLC for it, it just runs the Windows binary.

  2. Re:VLC as default by SeaFox · · Score: 3, Informative

    I wonder what legal reasons prevent including VLC as default media player in Android, ChromeOS, Windows.

    You sound like you already know the answer to your own question.
    VLC includes code to account decoding of patent-encumbered media formats. DVD playback, AAC, AC3 are all formats that are not really free for people to implement playback for without paying the piper.

    You know VLC for iOS will not decode AC3 -- unless you change you time zone location to somewhere outside the U.S.?