Today, we’re excited to released version 3.1 for iPhone and iPad and we’re bringing some exciting new and long- awaited features to our users!

Chromecast iPhone — **Chromecast** support!

VLC Version 3.1 doesn’t just play the usual formats that are supported by Chromecast, but now it can also play every single video and audio file that regularly plays in VLC.
*“How is this possible?"* you may ask
Because we’re not using the standard Chromecast SDK!

We know you have old family videos from back in the day or exotic formats and want to be able to cast them. That's why we’re converting them on the fly into a format that is understandable by the Chromecast.

It wasn’t an easy task getting this to work - it required adaption on every platform. On the iPhone and iPad, we’re using VideoToolbox, a low-level framework for hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding. We're still working hard to improve our Chromecast support to stream video as well as subtitles in the future!

VLC, Now With Improved 360-Degree Video

We’re also proud to announce that 360-degree videos can now be watched with device motion support, simply by moving your phone. This means you don’t need to upload your videos to an online service to be able to see them - instead, you can share them directly with your friends. If you want to share them with your friends at home simply mirror VLC to your Apple TV!

Device motion support for 360 video in VLC for iOS 3.1 (© Piste Lübeck)

We’re also rolling out additional improvements and bug fixes, including:

We fixed a bug where files on your phone were not displayed in VLC
Stability and performance improvements when decoding H.264/H.265 in hardware
Improved audio playback quality
Fixed a regression preventing the download of certain media files via http
Fixed a regression where downloaded files might disappear
Fixed a regression where users couldn't log into Google Drive

MobileVLCKit 3.1

Along with the new iOS release, we're also offering Chromecast support to all of our framework users. Since VideoToolbox is absolutely necessary for this, we had to raise our minimum target to iOS 8 and for tvOS to 10.2. For 360-degree videos, we've also added the ability to manipulate the videos axis directly.

We’ve also made a handful of helpful improvements to MobileVLCKit 3.1:

Included fixes for playback of AVI, MP4 and MKV files,
Added an API to enable deinterlacing
Brought the snapshot API to macOS
Fixed an Issue that led to green artifacts in H264 streams
Improved subtitle display

This major update is the result of months of work and I would like to thank Thomas, Soomin, Felix, Pierre, Adrien and others for their dedication to make this possible.