After a year and a half of development, the famous VLC media player released version 3.0.22, the latest update in the long-running “Vetinari” series, bringing some notable improvements that we shared with you in September.
The release introduces a new option for using a dark palette in the Qt interface on Windows and Linux, giving desktop users a more consistent appearance in dark-themed environments. It also adds compilation support for Qt6 alongside updated Qt5 versions, ensuring the 3.0 branch remains buildable on modern systems.
Moreover, Windows builds now include native ARM64 support, and users on older systems benefit from restored compatibility with Windows XP SP3 and certain older macOS releases. Several Windows-specific improvements are also implemented, including the ability to rename, move, or delete the currently playing file.
Hardware support expands with the addition of AMD’s Frame Rate Doubler for Direct3D11. Across platforms, the update improves support for A_ATRAC/AT1 in Matroska containers and, by default, disables several legacy libraries—libdca, libmpeg2, and liba52—in favor of the more modern libavcodec.
Multimedia handling receives extensive corrections. FLAC playback is now more reliable thanks to fixes for seeking logic and picture handling. JPEG files that previously displayed incorrectly now render as expected, and a long-standing issue causing failures when detecting VOB/AOB LPCM/MLP audio is resolved.
ASF files shorter than 1 second now play correctly, and Opus channel mapping has been updated for proper interpretation. The release also fixes hardware decoding of XVID MPEG-4 video through VideoToolbox on macOS.
Demuxer stability improves across the board, with multiple crash fixes reported by various contributors and automated testing systems. SFTP seeking works properly again on 32-bit systems, and large-file handling has been corrected. DVD CEA-608 caption parsing has been corrected.
Additional updates include improved ProRes 4:4:4:4 handling, a new dav1d-all-layers configuration, support for the chapter-codec option in Matroska, and the removal of outdated SAT>IP fallback behavior in UPnP.
Lastly, regarding platform-specific refinements, there are fixes for macOS playlist drag-and-drop crashes, improved MPRIS state handling in KDE when VLC starts from a file, and smoother volume slider scrolling in the Qt interface. Plus, Windows builds now restrict certain system parameter calls to XP, and UWP builds now provide more complete device information.
For more information, see the changelog.
