VLC Launches On Chrome OS Thanks To Android Port

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 17, 2015 @06:44AM 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.

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Quite Useful by freefal67 · 2015-12-17 07:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

While many people's first reaction might be that this is just a silly proof of concept, I can say from personal experience that it will actually be quite useful. I set up a Chromebox for my folks (got sick of providing Windows support). When my mom plugged in a USB drive with a short video, it wouldn't play without first being saved to Google Drive to be reencoded. Hopefully having a VLC app will fix the problem of ChromeOS only natively supporting a limited number of codecs.