A new version of VLC, the perennially popular open-source media player, is out with an assortment of improvements and new features.
VLC 3.0.21 is the first maintenance release to be issued year, following on from last autumn’s 3.0.20 release. Maintenance and support for the VLC 3.0.x series continues alongside efforts on the next major milestone, VLC 4.0.
A testament to its enduring versatility even in the age of streaming age was recent news that VLC passed a major milestone: 5 BILLION downloads. Announcing that, VideoLAN, the team who make the app, also shared exciting plans for the future of the app.
But before the future comes the present…
What’s new in VLC 3.0.21?
The VLC changelog says this update adds support for Super Resolution scaling on AMD GPUs.
VLC already supports Intel’s version and added NVIDIA RTX super resolution support last year. Adding the AMD equivalent is welcome – though not a surprise: it was announced at CES 2024.
Sticking with AMD and NVIDIA, VLC 3.0.21 adds a new AMD VQ Enhancer video filter (using AMF, looks to require a D3D11-compatible GPU), and, relatedly, a D3D11 option to ‘use NVIDIA TrueHDR to generate HDR from SDR sources’.
Elsewhere, VLC say Opus ambisonic support is improved in this update (which might be the ‘support third order ambisonic with family 2 mapping’ merge), as is Opus in MP4, and VAAPI hardware decoding with certain drivers, including the r600 Mesa.
VLC 3.0.21 now supports HTTP content range handling per RFC 9110, and resolves HLS Adaptive Streaming not working in audio-only mode.
Beyond that, there are a lot of fixes including a fair few for macOS, including better rendering of Asian-language subtitles, and a bunch of general bug balms and security patches. Library bumps see FFmpeg 4.4.4, dac1d 1.4.2, and libvpx 1.14.1 included.
And that’s it in a nutshell.
How to Upgrade to VLC 3.0.21
VLC 3.0.21 is free, open-source software. Windows and macOS installers will be added to the VLC download page in the next few days, and be available as an in-app update on those platforms.
New versions of VLC aren’t generally back-ported/added to the Ubuntu repos. Thus, if you want this update — if none of the fixes and features are things you’d use don’t feel pressured to chase it down — you will need to get it elsewhere.
But you’ve plenty of options.
Ubuntu users can download source code of VLC 3.0.21 from the VideoLAN website, or wait for this update to be packaged up and rolled out via Flathub (unverified), the Canonical Snap Store (official), or fetch it from some other avenue.