VLC Chromecast support is finally on the way — and that’s official.

The feature addition had been long anticipated, with the VideoLAN development team having tagged support for the streaming technology in its roadmap, forum posts and in media interviews.

But, until now, there was little in the way of real working code to support it.

That’s now changed.

VLC 3.0 Chromecast Support

In a ‘This Week in VideoLAN‘ blog post detailing recent work on VLC 3.0, VideoLAN developer JB Kempf offers the following update on Chromecast support:

“The Qt interface received the first renderers selection dialog. You should be able to detect your ChromeCast from this interface, and stream to it.”

Writing a few weeks prior to this latest update Kempf detailed how Chromecast support in VLC works:

“We started to introduce the concept of renderers in VLC. Those are distant devices displaying audio and/or video, instead of playing it locally. The usual device (sic) people know are ChromeCasts, UPnP/DLNA renderers, AirPlay, WiDi or DIAL devices. A new type of VLC module was introduced: renderer discovery . Like Service Discovery, they can find those renderers devices on the network, using one of the discovery protocols. The renderer discovery capability was implemented in our mDNS module.”

Kemp comments near that end of that blog post that:

“…after 4/5 redesigns, we’re almost happy with the [Chromecast] code”

Other New Changes

Another Linux-y development mention by Kempf that should find their way into a future VLC release is AppStream Metadata for Linux distributions, which will improve the appearance and description of app in the Ubuntu Software app.

Also mention are some backend tweaks to PulseAudio output, and an improved UPnP module that is now able to ‘support more type of servers [and] more metadata per item’.

VLC 3.0 Is Not Ready for Release Yet

The VLC 3.0 release date is not currently set, but nightly builds (i.e. unstable, potentially buggy) are available to download.

With work on the Chromecast plugin only taking place in these past few weeks it may be a little while for the feature filter from developer branches and into those used to build public binaries.

That said the latest Linux nightly builds do have various settings for adjusting Chromecast streams, but does not, as far as I can tell, yet expose a way to detect, list or connect to a Chromecast.