Newsletter 
Open source software is a great thing. It gives developers the opportunity to improve upon and better software while keeping everything free and open to the community. A particular non for-profit organization called “VideoLAN”, does just that with its free open source software. Ranging from its popular media player VLC, to its movie creator VLMC, the non-for profit organization promotes free open source multimedia solutions for developers.
The big news in today’s tech world are the developers plans to add media casting capabilities to its iOS as well as to its desktop players.VideoLAN’s most popular open source media player, VLC, will soon gain support from Chromecast. VLC is an open source media player and framework that plays most multimedia files such as, DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. What makes the VLC media player so popular is because it has the capability of playing close to every video format available online.The developers of VLC recently confirmed the news on their official VideoLAN forum. In response to a forum users question about bringing Chromecast compatibility in the dev pipeline, lead OSX and iOS developer Felix Paul K¼hne wrote, “Yep, this is exactly what we are up to!.” In addition to his response, Felix Paul K¼hne adds “In addition to the iOS variant, we are also working on a Windows / Linux / Mac implementation, which will take a bit longer because it’s harder.”
Google has yet to release an SDK for native apps on Windows, Mac or Linux, which would be the reason why Felix said it would take longer and be a much harder task. One option the developers of VLC could do is try and reverse engineer the functionality of the software. The only problem that brings are future updates that could potentially break it. Another option that could possibly be done is to try and work together with the Google Chrome browser, which is an open source project created by Google. Adding chromecast support to the desktop version of VLC will be an incredible feature. Not only can users connect to their TV, but now they will be able to cast videos straight from their computers hard drive and enjoy all of their personal content.