VLC Media Player

VLC Media Player is the multimedia player that has stood the test of time. I tried many of them. Back in the day, it competed with Media Player Classic and later MPC-HC. I saw them fade away or turn into forks, like MPC-BE.

VLC Media Player is the most mature and likely the most popular media player for the past decades. The VLC Team has kept a strong reputation for 24 years. It's not a popular open-source project; the people behind it make it great. I saw how they created a version for all popular OSS and a relentless update process.

So why is this media player so great?

Long story short, it can play almost anything that comes as audio or video. The most popular multimedia formats, like MP4, AVI, MKV, MP3, and FLAC, include some rare old file types that many other players cannot open.

If you're an old guy like me, you might recall the "codecs" days. Back then, you had to download and install them one by one. Sometimes, you need to adjust or find them in different libraries. The situation was frustrating, particularly on slow internet connections. Those were tough times, young people!

Not anymore. With VLC, you do not need to download any extra stuff. It simply plays everything you throw at it!

To summarize it, I made a short list with the things I love about it:

• No adware/spyware - trustworthy after 24 years.
• Plays almost anything that a media player can play
• Watch live videos
• You can convert media files (for example: convert a .mov into .mp4)
• You can use it to record your screen or even your webcam.
• Support for subtitle files, including syncing them manually.
• The ability to play partially or damaged files. etc.

Many other features and options exist, with some being added or improved over time. If this is your first time hearing about it, believe me, you won’t need another free media player.

VLC media player 3.0.23 'Vetinari'

This is the twenty-fourth release of VLC 3.0 branch, named "Vetinari", in reference to the Lord Patrician from Discworld.

3.0.23 is just a small fixup release compared to 3.0.22, fixing issues mostly on Windows for image display, security warnings, OpenGL. It also adds a small feature on audio codec information, and fixes extra security issues compared to the numerous we fixed in 3.0.22.

3.0.22 was large, here is what we wrote for the 3.0.22 release:

This update contains a few improvements and some important fixes:

• Add option to use dark palette on Qt interface (Windows & Linux)
• Add Windows ARM64 builds
• Fix support for Windows XP SP3 and some older macOS versions
• Allow renaming/moving/deleting of playing file on Windows
• Add A_ATRAC/AT1 support in matroska
• Add AMD GPU Frame Rate Doubler (Direct3D11)
• And a very large number of security issues fixed thanks to STF and oss-fuzz

and:

• Add compilation support for Qt6 and newer versions of Qt5
• Prevent FLAC seeking logic get stuck
• Handle pictures in FLAC
• Fix VOB/AOB LPCM/MLP detection failing occasionally
• Cut QNap title on first invalid character
• Fix display of certain JPEG files
• Fix playback of very short ASF files (duration less than 1s)
• Fix crashes in multiple demuxers (reported by rub.de, oss-fuzz and others)
• Fix SFTP seeking for large files on 32-bit OS
• Fix Opus channel mapping
• Fix hardware decoding with VideoToolbox of XVID MPEG-4 video
• Fix DVD CEA-608 captions parsing
• Fix ProRes 4:4:4:4
• Disable decoding using libdca, libmpeg2 and liba52 by default in favor of libavcodec
• Add dav1d-all-layers option
• Restrict SystemParametersInfo calls to Windows XP
• Handle mkv-use-chapter-codec option
• UPnP: remove SAT>IP channel list fallback
• Use a better stretch mode in wingdi
• Fetch missing device information when running in UWP
• Qt: Add option to use dark palette
• Qt: Add compilation support for newer versions of Qt5
• Qt: Fix scrolling on volume slider
• macOS: fix crashes when drag'n drop items in the playlist
• KDE: fix MPRIS state when started from file