PARIS – The VLC media player was released on Tuesday on the new Apple TV. The advanced media device will now enable users to have access to all their video files in their native formats on Apple’s latest streaming box and TV, letting them play “virtually all formats under the sun”, as said by VideoLAN President Jean-Baptiste Kempf.
This is good news to users who had been struggling with collections in formats the Cupertino device does not support. The free app automatically finds files on your local network and also allows you to browse your collection with the remote.
In addition, there’s a Remote Playback functionality that enables you to beam media from other computers to your TV by using a Web browser, allowing you to play media you have not shared just yet and tweak playback speed in case you want to zip through tedious segments.
Moreover, VideoLAN announced that VLC handles custom playback speed, which gives the app a huge advantage over the rest of the players on Apple TV so far.
“VLC is increasingly used to watch talks and documentation in education, so it was naturally of high importance for us to include this feature from the start”, the company stated. The nonprofit firm said it has been working to support the player for iPad and iPhone to the new Apple TV since September last year, when Tim Cook released the latest Siri-equipped box.
VideoLAN said the long-awaited player required some adaptations to work properly on the Apple TV, but that they were excited to finally announce the first version of VLC for the Apple’s device. You can’t stream files from cloud services, such as OneDrive, Dropbox and Box, but the company affirmed it is working to make it possible. Cloud service support is already in beta testing.
VideoLAN is based in the French capital and has no employees. Thanks to voluntary contributions from users, the company supports the development of open source multimedia solutions that are free of charge. There are no ads, spyware or other “mis-features” under VLC usage, since a business model is out of the equation.
Source: VideoLAN Organization