Stay on Top of Emerging Technology Trends Get updates impacting your industry from our GigaOm Research Community

The popular open source media player VLC could get Chromecast support soon: VLC developers recently confirmed on the official VideoLAN forum that they’re currently working on bringing Chromecast support to the media player (hat tip to Reddit user badgerflower). Lead OSX and iOS developer Felix Paul Kühne wrote:

“In addition to the iOS variant, we are also working on a Windows / Linux / Mac implementation, which will take a bit longer because it’s harder.”

Kühne added in an email that Chromecast support will be included in the next update of the iOS app. He said that he couldn’t give a firm date, but said that it could possibly be released within the next four to six weeks. Kühne also said that the feature would be added to the VLC Android app once the iOS version ships.

Enabling casting from the desktop app is likely harder because Google (S GOOG) hasn’t released an SDK for native apps on Windows, Mac or Linux yet. This means that the VLC team would either have to reverse engineer the functionality — which could lead to updates breaking it — or have VLC work in concert with the Chrome browser.

VLC is an open source video player application that’s popular because it’s capable of playing close to every video format available online. Adding Chromecast capabilities to the desktop version of VLC could make it easier for users to cast video files from their computer’s hard drive to the TV screen.

This post was updated on 6/7 with additional information about the release timing.