It’s been over a year since VLC, a free open source media player you might have heard of before, was last updated — but a new one is about to arrive.

VLC 3.0.22 is the twenty-third release in the VLC 3.0 series, which debuted back in 2018. Videolan (the non-profit company who make the player) continues to do maintenance and support for the VLC 3.0.x series alongside its work on the next major milestone, VLC 4.0.

On Friday (19 September), VLC 3.0.22 was tagged as release candidate. A stable release is likely to follow soon-ish, after a final bout of testing.

What’s New in VLC 3.0.22?

The NEWS file for VLC 3.0.22 describes the update as offering ‘a few improvements and some fixes’. I find that a rather modest summary as there are some notable changes are in tow, derived from over 700 commits since the last release.

For instance, thanks to a Sovereign Tech Fund grant VLC 3.0.22 has the distinction of taking the title of release with ‘the most security fixes ever’, which is pretty neat!

On Windows, VLC now has official Windows ARM64 builds (requires Windows 10 RS5 17763/1809 or later) and adds support for AMD’s Frame Rate Doubler feature in Direct3D11 (for those using VLC with AMD GPUs).

VLC once again works on Windows XP SP3 (some people run old OSes for fun, nostalgia projects), and allows actively playing files to be renamed, moved or deleted on Windows.

This version of the versatile media player gains compilation support for Qt 6 and the latest Qt 5.

A ‘dark palette’ option is available in Preferences for Qt builds on Windows and Linux, as macOS has dark mode support for a while. VLC 3.0.21 in the Ubuntu 25.10 repos appears to already offer this option, but as it’s listed in the changelog, I’m mentioning it..

Based on a merge request, the option is being renamed to ‘dark mode’ for the stable release. Since that is how most people would describe the feature (and a bit easier for VLC’s string translators), perhaps that’s why it’s mentioned.

Of course, playing media is VLC’s primary role, and on that front there are fixes and changes:

  • Decoders
    • Add dav1d-all-layers flag (outputs all spatial layers, defaults to off)
    • Fix Opus channel mapping (regression in 3.0.21)
    • Fix hardware-accelerated playback of Xvid MP4 using VideoToolbox
    • Fix DVD CEA-608 captions parsing
    • Fix ProRes 4:4:4:4
  • Demuxers
    • Support mkv-use-chapter-codec option
    • Add A_ATRAC/AT1 matroska support
    • Prevent FLAC seek logic from hanging
    • Support embedded pictures in FLAC
    • Fix occasional VOB/AOB LPCM/MLP detection failures
    • Truncate QNap title at first invalid character
    • Fix display issues with some JPEG files
    • Fix playback of ASF files shorter than 1 second

Plus, fixes for seeking in large video/audio files running on a 32-bit OS over SFTP, the UPnP service discovery component will stop using the SAT>IP channel-list as a fallback source for channel info, and fetching device info when running in UWP.

Get VLC 3.0.22

VLC 3.0.22 is currently release candidate status, with source available on the official project code page (if you fancy compiling it yourself).

Keep an eye out for final, stable binary builds, which will be made available after any latterly-discovered quirks get ironed out.

Once released, Ubuntu users won’t find VLC 3.0.22 available in the regular Ubuntu repos but it will be trivial to install from an alternative source like Flathub, Snap Store or a PPA.

That said, if none of the fixes or features newly added sound essential, don’t feel pressured to chase this update down – the version of VLC in the Ubuntu repos works fine, and the one in the 24.04 LTS repo is receives critical security updates when Ubuntu Pro is enabled.