VLC on ChromeOS

ChromeOS is one of the last Operating Systems where you could not run VLC and play all your media as you wished.

Even worse, it was the only significant Desktop Operating Systems that we did not support (so far, VLC exists for Windows, OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS/2, Haiku/BeOS, ReactOS).

At the same time, VLC for Android is quite popular and is supported on most phones and tablets, and is currently being expanded to Android TVs or other forms of Android.

Today, I'm pleased to tell you that you can use it now! DOWNLOAD!









Android Runtime on Chrome

A few months ago, the Chrome team announced the possibility to run some Android applications on Chrome OS using the new Android Runtime for Chrome. Starting from that moment, we wanted to support this runtime.

Why did we want ARC support?

VLC is mostly a native application on all ​platforms​, using low-level APIs to output video, audio and get access to threads. VLC is using mostly C , C++ and hand-crafted ASM to get the best performance, as required for a realtime application.

Therefore, it's currently impossible to port VLC to Javascript and other Web technologies (or FirefoxOS). It might be possible in the future, but this is off-topic. :D

Usually, the mobile ports of VLC, like VLC for Android, VLC for iOS or Windows phone, use the native language of the platforms to create the interfaces and the media database.

For ChromeOS, the only solution we saw, before ARC was announced, was using PPAPI, NaCL and Javascript, but that would require to rewrite a complete interface in Javascript and would be a bit problematic for the database. That work would have taken months of work.

Therefore the ARC solution was a blessing , and helped us to recycle 95% of the Android code and optimizations we did in the last months (some are not released yet).

Of course, some work was required, nothing is magical, but way less than other solutions.

Features

VLC on ChromeOS supports:

all video files supported in VLC, including MKV and DVD ISOs,

and ISOs, all audio files supported in VLC, including FLAC and other weird audio formats,

and other weird audio formats, subtitles files, from SRT to SSA and with auto-detection, when possible,

to and with auto-detection, when possible, a media database like on Android and iOS to select the right medias, and resume playback,

like on Android and iOS to select the right medias, and resume playback, playback of streams, local and on the internet, include adaptive streaming like HLS or DASH ,

or , we also support playlists, accelerated playback, audio equalizer, audio/video synchronization and hardware accelerated video/audio decoding.









Open Source and Free Software

As everything VideoLAN is doing, VLC for ChromeOS is completely free and open source.

We would LOVE help to improve this port! Join the community, fork the code and send patches!

The source code is licensed under the GPL (v2 or later) and is currently distributed as GPLv3, like VLC for Android.

Compatibility

The current version was tested on the 2 ChromeBooks we had access to:

a Chromebook Pixel,

an HP Chromebook 14.

It is possible that there are issues with other machines, and we ADVISE to use the latest Chrome 48 or the current beta version, to test VLC.

Please report the bugs, if you can!

Nota Bene: ChromeBit

Currently, the Chromebit by ASUS is untested, because it seems to be not available in France yet, and ASUS did not answer to our query to get access to one.

Any testing on this would be welcome!

Nota Bene 2: ARChon

In the same way, ARChon Runtime is currently not supported, because it was not tested at all.

Help on this is welcome too!

Download

You can download it here!

Be careful, it's just the first release, but for now, Enjoy!