VLC Media Player Finally Supported by Chrome OS: What This Means for Chromebook Users

VLC Media Player has been known over the past 14 years as "the" software for media playback, mainly because of its flexibility in supporting different audio and video codex.

The VLC continued what the former BSPlater started, and improving it a hundred times over. Still, there is room for improvement, and a new milestone was reached when the player was finally supported by the Chrome OS Platform.

As of now, Utah Peoples Post noted that the media player has been downloaded almost a billion times across different platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS and Android.

For Chromebook users, their media players have been limited to support only the OS media player, but since the update, users can download VLC from the Chrome Web Store. This means, that much like the other platforms, Chrome OS can now support all other video and audio files, including MKV, FLAC and DVD ISO. With this, Chrome OS users can also use the VLC to stream media files from local or internet sources, with the features available for other platforms also made available, such as subtitles, accelerated playbacks, playlists, and even the audio equalizer and hardware-accelerated decoding.

The app, according to Engadget, was made possible by Google's App Runtime for Chrome or ARC, which has allowed developers to repurpose Android apps to work on Chrome OS.

President of VideoLAN Jean-Baptiste Kempf explained about the Chrome version, stating that the team used about 95 percent of the Android Code for the OS version, as it was extremely time-consuming to build the program from scratch. While not ideal, this is especially important considering that the App Runtime adoption hasn't been very visible among developers, and only a handful of Android to Chrome ports such as Evernote, Vine and Cloud Magic were able to adopt it.

As of the moment, VLC for Chrome OS has been tested on the Chromebook Pixel and the HP Chromebook 14, but it's not at its best yet as some users have reported issues on Samsung Chromebooks. Kempf did promise, however, that the team is still working to fix the said bugs associated with the program, so users will have to be patient.

The necessity for Chrome OS and Android to work together in apps similar to the VLC is especially important, because there have been rumors of a Chrome OS -- Android merger coming in the next years, although this update is considered a rumor at the moment.

What do you think of VLC for Chrome so far?