When it comes to streaming video, there are little (if any) tools more popular than the Chromecast for getting your movies and TV shows up onto the big screen. When it comes to third-party video software, the same thing could be said about VLC, which is quite possibly the most popular third-party video player that’s available, and there’s an Android app so you can use it on mobile devices too. The downside with VLC is that it doesn’t currently have Chromecast support, and if you enjoy watching videos from your local stash, you won’t be casting them to a TV, not now anyway.
That seems to be changing though, as VLC recently posted a blog about their weekend exploits which included preparing the video player for Chromecast support. What’s more, is that they were even able to get a pre-release build up and running that anyone who is interested can try out. Some things of note, however, is that there are some bugs in the pre-release build, naturally, so users shouldn’t expect things to be completely functional and without issue. The other things worth mentioning are that the pre-release build is for PC only, and there’s a still a possibility that the build won’t work, so you may end up grabbing the snapshot of the latest nightly build and have nothing to show for your work of going through the install process.
Speaking on the installation, VLC made it very clear that there is absolutely no support for nightly builds, so installing the software is an “at your own risk” situation and should only be attempted if you’ve safeguarded yourself in the event something goes wrong. With support now being prepped, VLC users can now feel a little assured that they will be able to stream videos to Chromecast at some point in the future. VLC has not mentioned any sort of a time frame for stable Chromecast support, and there was no talk of any support for the Android app just yet, but even if they bring support to the PC version of VLC first, it likely wouldn’t be too far out from the app.