Nowadays it is difficult to talk about an ideal multimedia player and not think about VLC immediately. The open source and multiplatform project has come over the years to basically everything: Windows, Linux, Mac OS, iOS, Android, etc. And it is capable of playing almost any audio or video format you throw at it. What is the next step?

In early November 2016, Jason Scott decided to propose to the community the realization of a VLC port in Javascript . Having something oriented to the web is simply another place to go. His proposal was well received and the development process has begun. This means that we could soon have a version of the VLC player that works inside any modern browser.

Thanks to the attention generated by the Scott post on the web, those who maintain VLC have connected with the developers of Emularity and Emscripten and have managed to advance the work of months in just days. There is currently a compiled version of the VLC player in JavaScript.

The VLC team has already had to develop VLC for a huge number of platforms, so this new project together with JavaScript and emulation specialists have made the process quite fluid.

Because it is important

Scott believes that this project would fundamentally change the relationship of audio and video to the web. In his blog explains why it is important and why choose VLC to do the job:

VLC is one of those things that people love. It is flexible, well maintained and focused. VLC is like a boat that throws a variety of containers and visual or sound files to do something with them. That VLC can deal with all this is something huge. Its open source status and universal focus ideally would make VLC available to all browsers instantly make people find time to improve and add new formats to support.

VLC on the web instead of converting those rare and old formats to something your browser can understand, which is what they do today, would reproduce them directly. That ability and the possibility of more people getting on the train to support more formats that would otherwise never be reproduced in a browser is the ultimate goal of the project.