Now there shall be no more endless converting of your videos to make them more palatable to your Apple TV’s desires. VLC, the software that famously supports a wide range of file formats, is now available on the new Apple TV.
We’ve known that a VLC app was coming to Apple TV for a few months. But according to a post at VideoLAN, the VLC developer blog, the team has been testing an app since November, and it’s now ready for prime time:
Our mission for VLC for the Apple TV was to fulfil our claim “plays it all” and we got close: it supports virtually all formats under the sun (like the iOS version of VLC). Before demonstrating VLC’s advanced playback experience on the Apple TV, let’s discuss about ways how to actually access content!
Hell yeah, let’s talk about it! There’s a full rundown at the developer site, but here are the highlights.
Content discovery
You can easily access your files and search for whatever you want to watch using SMB, UPnP media server, FTP and PLEX protocols.
Remote playback
This is probably the coolest thing: You can send your files directly from a browser or app right to your Apple TV, in a process known as “casting”.
Streams that have recently played on your other devices will show up here, too.
Playback controls
Beyond that, you’ll have plenty of ways to customise your viewing experience, including playback speed, chapter navigation and the ability to add subtitles through OpenSubtitles.org.
One thing that’s not on the initial release: Cloud support. However, the developers are testing it now and you should be able to get files from places like Dropbox soon. And of course, it’s only available for the latest generation of Apple TVs.
This all sounds almost too good to be true for Apple TV owners. We’ll update as soon as we’ve tried it.
Read the whole post from VideoLAN.