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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

VideoLAN has released version 3.0.0 [videolan.org] of the VLC media player [wikipedia.org] for Windows, Linux, BSD, Android, and macOS. The new version is billed as enabling hardware decoded playback of 4K, 8K, and 360-degree video (in a demonstration video [vimeo.com], VLC 3.0.0 is shown playing 8K 48fps 360-degree video on a Samsung Galaxy S8).

3.0.0 adds support [videolan.org] for (not exhaustive):

• Network browsing of distant filesystems (using SMB, FTP, SFTP, NFS...)
• External audio tracks (ac3, m4a, aac, dts...)
• 12-bit color and (10-bit) high dynamic range
• Chromecast (an open source implementation of the proprietary Google Cast [wikipedia.org] protocol)
• 360-degree video/audio
• Ambisonic audio [wikipedia.org] and more than 8 audio channels
• Audio passthrough [rtings.com]
• Blu-Ray Java menus
• H.265/HEVC [wikipedia.org] hardware decoding on Windows, Android, OS X, iOS
• AOMedia Video 1 [wikipedia.org] (AV1) video, and Daala [wikipedia.org] (elements of Daala have been incorporated into AV1). VideoLAN is a member of the Alliance for Open Media [videolan.org], which develops the AV1 format.

Linux/BSD default video output is now OpenGL, instead of Xvideo [wikipedia.org].

The 3.0.x branch of VLC will be maintained as long-term support versions and will be the last releases on Windows XP (with significant limitations), Vista, macOS 10.7, 10.8 & 10.9, iOS 7 & 8, Android 2.x, 3.x, 4.0.x & 4.1.x, and the last to run on compilers before gcc 5.0 and clang 3.4, or equivalent.

From VLC Android developer Geoffrey Métais's blog post about the release [github.io], which discusses why Chromecast support took so long to add, as well as other missing features that have now been added to the Android version:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Chromecast support is everywhere and VLC took years to get it, right, but there are plenty of good reasons for it:

First of all, VideoLAN is a nonprofit organization and not a company. There are few developers paid for making VLC, most of them do it in their free time. That's how you get VLC for free and without any ads!

Also, VLC is 100% Open Source and Chromecast SDK isn't: We had to develop our very own Chromecast stack by ourselves. This is also why there is no voice actions for VLC (except with Android Auto), [and] we cannot use Google Play Services.

Furthermore, Chromecast is not designed to play local video files: When you watch a Youtube video, your phone is just a remote controller, nothing more. Chromecast streams the video from youtube.com. That's where it becomes complicated, Chromecast only supports very few codecs number, let's say h264. Google ensures that your video is encoded in h264 format on youtube.com, so streaming is simple. With VLC, you have media of any format. So VLC has to be a http server like youtube.com, and provide the video in a Chromecast compatible format. And of course in real time, which is challenging on Android because phones are less powerful than computers.

At last, VLC was not designed to display a video on another screen. It took time to properly redesign VLC to nicely support it. The good news is we did not make a Chromecast specific support, it is generic renderers: in the next months we can add UPnP support for example, to cast on any UPnP box or TV!

Also at The Verge [theverge.com] and Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com].

Related: Stable Release of VLC 1.0 for Android [soylentnews.org]
VLC 2.0 for Android Released [soylentnews.org]
EU Offers Cash Bounties to Improve the Security of VLC Media Player [soylentnews.org]
Google Won't Take Down Pirate VLC With 5M Downloads (Update: They Have Taken it Down) [soylentnews.org]

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