Popular media player, VLC is now being updated to v3.0. Known as ‘Ventinary’, the new versions bring a lot of new features and functions to the player, including support for Chromecast, and much more. It enables hardware decoding by default and supports 10-bit HDR. You can check out the complete changelog by clicking here. The latest update is available for Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Android TV, Windows RT, Windows Phone, Windows 10 Mobile, Xbox One, Linux and many more.

Support for Chromecast is arguably the highlight of VLC 3.0. In a separate post, VLC developer Geoffrey Metis explained that bringing the feature was not an easy task, which is why the feature seems to take so long to reach the end. In addition, they had to design solutions to characterize the function according to purpose.

“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 video from youtube.com. Supporting numbers, let’s say h264. Google makes sure that your video is encoded on youtube.com in h264 format, so streaming is easy. With VLC, you have media of any format. So VLC has an http server like youtube.com. And the video must be rendered in Chromecast compatible format. And of course in real time, which is challenging on Android because phones are less powerful than computers, “says Metais.

The developer added that the function would consume a lot of the device’s CPU and battery power, for example, support for Chromecast should be considered beta for now.