VLC media player finally comes to Chrome OS thanks to Android Runtime on Chrome

Better late than never, right? VLC has announced that they’re finally bringing their fantastic media playing application to Google’s Chrome OS, marking off the last check box on its compatibility list.

What’s interesting is how the VLC managed to get things working, since Chrome OS technically doesn’t support normal “programs” like you’d download on Windows/OS X/Linux. If you’ve ever used Chrome OS, you know it uses apps/programs that are basically run inside of Chrome, the web browser, which all use Javascript. For something like VLC, porting the program over to Javascript from mostly C and C++ code was nearly impossible, which is what has kept the player away from Chrome OS for so long.

However, since Google announced the Android Runtime for Chrome that would allow some Android applications to run on Chrome OS, the VLC developers were able to use most of the Android application’s code to run on Chrome OS without a problem. That means this version of VLC is essentially the Android app, built to work on Chrome OS. Pretty nifty workaround, if you ask me.

The first release seems to have all of the features of the normal VLC player, so you won’t be missing anything by using it on Chrome OS instead of a different environment.

source: VLC

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