Play 360° Videos and Images in VLC Media Player

World’s most popular media player VideoLAN VLC Media Player now supports playing of 360° videos and images beginning with the version 3.0 of the player which is available both for the Windows as well as Mac users. They have also supplied some sample videos and one JPEG image so that you can test the new 360° features yourself. But do not confuse 360° videos with the virtual reality or augmented reality videos. These are simply the high-resolution spherical videos that allow you to have a 360° viewing experience and using your fingers on a touchscreen or a mouse you can move the viewpoint around at any angle as the video is being played.

VLC Media Player 360°

On some of the online video sharing sites like Dailymotion you can also find some of the videos in the 360° format. You can actually search these sites for “360 degree video” or just “360°” and you will find plenty of these videos. In fact, you can even play these videos in VLC 360° Player by just copying and pasting the URL. For this you have to first copy the URL of the video site using Ctrl+C hotkey and then in the VLC player, use Ctrl+V to paste and then click on the Play button.

VLC Media Player 360°

Of course, you can play an already downloaded or recorded 360° video in VLC player by opening it in VLC player. Once a video is being played in VLC Player, you can control the 360 degree view using the mouse, using your keyboard or if you have touchscreen then using your fingers. VLC has some hotkeys for this purpose too, for example, you can use the PageUp and PageDown to increase the viewpoint zoom or decrease the viewpoint zoom.

VLC Media Player 360°

You can configure more hotkeys in VLC player related to the 360° control from the VLC settings. You will have to search for the 360° related settings. Some the hotkeys like rolling the viewpoint clockwise or counter-clockwise are unassigned in the default installation of VLC 360° player.

You can download VLC Video Player 3.0 with 360° video features from http://people.videolan.org/~jb/Builds/360/ .