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VLC marks huge milestone with new killer feature

The hugely-popular multi-format video player VLC has announced it will be adding AirPlay support to the app, after confirming it is about to surpass the three-billion downloads marker.

The Videolan company is building on its support of Chromecast last year, by building the ability to send content via an iPhone or Android device, directly to the Apple TV set top box and other supported displays.

Best of all, the release may come as part of the next major update, VLC 4, which is due to land around a month from now.

Speaking to Variety at CES 2019, the company said: “Just like with Chromecast, we intend to support AirPlay on any platform. There is no release date yet at all.

“We would like it to be part of VLC 4, which is the next major release we are currently working on. We will let you know in advance once we define a date.”

Related: Best of CES 2019

While Apple has been absent from CES 2019, as per usual, it’s been a massive week for the company’s AirPlay media casting platform. In a surprise announcement by the two companies, Apple and Samsung revealed AirPlay will be available on its 2018 and 2019 smart TV sets, spreading the tech’s reach.

In announcing the app is about to surpass a staggering three billion downloads, the team behind the open source app also demonstrated some enhanced support for virtual reality. This enables users of devices like the HTC Vive to view 2D movies in a virtual theatre using the VLC application.

Videolan said it reverse engineered VR headsets in order to offer native support through the VLC app. It says this was achieved by adding only 1MB of code to the app, while going through the SDKs would haver added ‘hundreds of megabytes.’

Is VLC still your go-to app for video? Drop us a line @TrustedReviews on Twitter.

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