VLC Media player has been with us for nearly two decades and it has gone through a lot since its inception. It was (and still is for some people) the go-to media player for desktop operating systems, but it took them a while until they were released on Android. Since its launch on the platform back in 2014, VLC has gained more success as it grew into the fully featured media player that it is today. The company is at CES this week and it has been revealed they are working on their Android app gaining support for Airplay.
The team behind VLC is excited about surpassing the 3 billion downloads milestone since its first release back in 2001. They had a download counter set up at CES in Las Vegas this week, but they are there for more reasons. Variety was able to sit down and have a talk with Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the app’s lead developers, and we learned that about a quarter of these downloads have come from mobile devices. As their interview continued they discussed VLC's roadmap which actually includes support for Apple's Airplay.
Mr. Kempf has been quoted saying that this feature could end up rolling out to Android devices using VLC in about a month. This will allow Android users with an Apple TV to stream their videos to the Apple device in a similar fashion to Chromecast. At the company's CES booth they were also demonstrating the application's enhanced support for VR. The team behind the app reverse-engineered "most VR headsets" to natively support VR video through the main VLC app.
They went this route because using the SDKs from these manufacturers would have added hundreds of MB of code to VLC. Instead, they went their own route so that users would be able to watch traditional 2D movies in a virtual theater environment using their application.