Finally, The Wait Is Over! VLC’s Biggest-Ever Update Is Now Available for Download

What is your answer to the question “do you want to use Windows Media Player to open this file?” Of course, VLC is the answer. VLC is most probably one of the best open-source gifts to humankind – lightweight, bloat-resistant, stable, and endlessly compatible software that is mostly used to play back pirated movies.

After a gap of two years, VLC has finally got its major update - VLC 3.0, which is now available on all the supported VLC platforms. The new update, Vetinari also adds support for HDR video, hardware decoding, and yes – Chromecast compatibility. Vetinari is hardware accelerated on all the platforms, which makes it powerful enough to do 4K and 8K playback on normal phones and computers. Moreover, it can play Chromecast videos that aren’t natively supported by Chromecast. It also works with Blu-ray Java menus! It is even optimized for the iPhone X’s notch. Amazing, right?

Making it Chromecast compatible is undoubtedly the major headline feature of this new update by VLC. The tough part about Chromecast support is always about converting local media files to play perfectly with Google’s preferred format.

This is what VLC’s Android developer, Geoffrey Métais said about it:

“When you watch a YouTube video, your phone is just a remote controller, nothing more. Chromecast streams the video from youtube.com. That’s where it becomes complicated, Chromecast only supports very few codecs, let’s say h264. Google ensures that the video is encoded in the h264 format on youtube.com, so streaming is simple. With VLC, you have media of any format. So VLC has to be an HTTP server like youtube.com and provide the video in a Chromecast compatible format. And of course in real time, which is challenging on Android because phones are less powerful than computers.”