Play More Media Formats on your Chromebook with VLC
Published on
by Jim Mendenhall
Tags:
Chromebooks,
Chrome OS,
Chromebook Tutorials
While the built-in video and audio players in Chrome OS can play quite a few different file formats, you are likely to come across media files that won’t play by default on your Chromebook. Windows, Linux and Mac users have long turned to VLC to play audio and video files, network streams, and DVDs. Recently, VLC has been released for Chrome OS as well.
The version of VLC for Chrome devices is a modified version of VLC for Android which takes advantage of the Google’s App Runtime for Chrome. VLC for Chrome OS plays most local video and audio files, network streams. Supported formats include MKV, MP4, AVI, MOV, Ogg, FLAC, TS, M2TS, Wv and AAC. The player will even play video files off of an external USB DVD drive or a DVD ISO file.
To get started with VLC on your Chromebook, visit the VLC page on the Chrome Web Store, read the instructions and click Install. The installation process takes quite a bit longer than normal, but it will eventually install. On first launch, point VLC towards your local media folder and start playing your files.
In our testing, there are still some bugs in this fresh version of VLC, but those should be worked out soon. If you’re a programmer who is interested in helping out the project, you can find the source code on the VLC website.
