CES 2019: VLC plans to add AirPlay support

Janko Roettgers/Variety

We concentrate a lot on hardware with our CES coverage but there’s been a lot of movement in the software space. And Apple has a way of being at the show without actually being there. This time we get an update from open-source video player VLC. Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the app’s lead developers, told Variety that it plans to bring AirPlay support from Android or iPhone to the Apple TV. It should be coming to the main VLC app in “about a month” for free. The video app closes in out its three billion download mark and has been celebrating the news at its booth in CES.

The other feature VLC was demoing at CES included better support for virtual reality, making it possible to watch 2D movies in a virtual theater environment within VR headsets. The developers managed to reverse-engineer most VR headsets to natively support VR video through the main VLC app without needing to add “hundreds of megabytes” of code to VLC. The demo was just based on around 1MB of additional code.