VLC, the open source video player app was about to surpass the 3 billion downloads level on Friday. Of course, the Videolan team could not miss this occasion to celebrate the success of their product. In order to make it as visible as possible and get a little bit of help from their fans, they set up a special download counter at their CES booth in Las Vegas.
According to one of the lead developers of the app, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, and based on VLC’s estimations, this milestone should have been surpassed on Friday some time afternoon.
Kempf is obviously looking forward to improving VLC especially after seeing how wanted it is and one of those changes would be the introduction of Airplay. This implementation offers Android users the possibility of beaming videos to their Apple TVs from their mobile devices. If you are wondering when that would happen, Kempf said that in about a month Airplay should make its way to the main VLC app.
During the CES celebration, another feature was demonstrated, the enhanced support for VR. This offers the possibility of watching traditional 2D movies in a virtual theater environment while using headsets such as the HTC Vive.
According to Kempf, the Videolan team got most VR headsets to support natively, through the main VLC app, VR video all by reverse-engineering them. VLC would have gotten hundreds of megabytes of code added if they had relied on the SDKs of headset manufacturers. However, this is based on just around 1 megabyte of additional code.
Other implementations on VLC’s list is simplifying the switch from iTunes and building out a more complete media library for its app. However, Kempf said that building a comprehensive media center solution is not the goal here as they are not willing to compete with other more developed platforms.
