Finally! VLC, one of the more popular media players available on the desktop Windows platform, is set to receive support for 360 degree videos in an upcoming major update.
The developmental 3.0 branch has been a long time coming, and the developers have announced that they have implemented support for these types of videos in this version — with a little help from the folks over at Giroptic.
They helped with the project by providing samples, cameras, code as well as their expertise on the 360 degree videos functionality.
Of course, simple implementation is not the news here, the team has also added:
■ Playback of 360 Videos following the Spatial Video spec.
■ Playback of 360 Photos and Panoramas following the Spherical spec.
■ Display modes with Zoom, Little planet and Reverse little planet.
■ Control it with your Mouse and Keyboard.
■ Open Source and Cross-platform, accelerated with OpenGL and Direct3D11.
Giroptic, co-founder and CEO, Richard Ollier, commented on this work saying:
“VLC is one of the video players most widely used in the world. We are very proud to contribute our expertise in 360° to this open source player. This will allow millions of VLC users to take full advantage of a promising new technology and be widely involved in it democratization.”
Of course, seeing an implementation from Microsoft natively into Windows 10 would have been icing on the cake for the Creators Update, seeing as how much the company is focusing on content creation with this upcoming update for its operating system.
But VLC Player will do the job for now, and do a good job of it, by the looks of things.
The current technical preview for the popular multimedia program is now out for Windows and Mac, with plans for more platform and hardware support in due time, for sure.
source:windows10update
