In June of last year the awesome hands behind the popular VLC media player confirmed their intention to support Chromecast, Google’s then semi-new media streaming dongle, in its suite of apps.
Seven or so months on from that soundbite, and no Cast-ready functionality on offer in the so-called Swiss Army knife of video players, you’d be forgiven for thinking the team got caught up in the hype surrounding the HDMI streamer at the time.
Not so.
As an open-source project it’s very easy to check in on VLC to find out what it’s up to. Nestled amongst VLC’s changelog in its Git repo — a popular distributed version control system — is a file detailing the differences between the 2.2.x series and the upcoming VLC 3.0.0 release. In the section ‘Stream Output’ is this:
Way-hey!
The change, spotted by Android France, confirms that Chromecast support is a feature VideoLAN developers are actively committed to bringing to the table.
Whether we’ll see it in the team’s Android and iOS apps first (easier since Google provides developers with APIs for this) or whether they will tackle the ‘harder’ part of integrating Cast functionality in its cross-platform desktop players remains, for now, to be seen.