14 DAY TRIAL // After many months of hard work, VideoLAN announced today the release and general availability of the VLC 3.0 open-source media player for all supported platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.
Dubbed "Vetinari," VLC 3.0 is probably the biggest update ever of the VLC Media Player application used by millions of computer and mobile users worldwide. It comes with numerous modern features and technologies, including support for Apple's iPhone X, 360-degree video playback, 3D audio support, and HDR video support.
VLC 3.0 also supports 4K and 8K playback by enabling hardware decoding by default, supports 10bits videos, allows audio passthrough for HD audio codecs, can play BD-J Blu-Ray Java menus, supports browsing of NAS (Network-attached storage) and local network drives like FTP, SFTP, and SMB, as well as streaming to Google Chromecast devices.
Here's what's new in VLC 3.0
Prominent new features of VLC 3.0 include support for Ambisonics audio, support for playing streams with more than eight audio channels, support for extended colorspaces (HDR) and 12bits codec, support for live modification of subtitles size, and HDMI passthrough for various Audio HD codecs like TrueHD, DTS-HD, and E-AC3.
The player also comes with hardware decoding and display for all supported platforms, brand-new VA-API decoder and rendering for GNU/Linux systems, new hardware-accelerated decoder for Apple's iOS and macOS operating systems, HEVC hardware decoding on Microsoft Windows with D3D11 and DxVA2, and on Android with MediaCodec and OMX.
On Android platforms, VLC 3.0 also supports hardware decoding for VC1/WMV3 and MPEG-2 streams, Chromecast streaming from smartphones, Android Auto support with voice actions, support for all Android TV, Chromebooks, and Samsung DeX devices, Picture-in-Picture (PiP) support, as well as automatic detection of playlist files.
On the other hand, VLC 3.0 brings better output support for Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi 2 devices and significant improvements for the MMAL decoder. MKV (Matroska) support was improved as well, along with the PS, MP4, and TS demuxers. HD-DVD .evo support is available as well.
New codecs, video/audio filters and outputs
As expected, VLC 3.0 comes with a bunch of new audio and video codecs to support even more of today's streams. These include OggSpots video decoder, AV1 and Daala video decoders (experimental), new, libbpg-based BPG decoder, new, libmpg123-based MPEG 2.5 and MPEG-1 & 2 audio layer I, II, III decoders, support for TTML subtitles, and an HDMV deocoder for BluRay text subtitles.
Support for webVTT subtitles was improved to recognize CSS styles, and the SpeedHQ, TDSC, FMVC, Canopus HQX, QDMC, Cineform, and Pixlet decoders are also included. New Tizen audio output is available in VLC 3.0, which improves the AudioTrack output for Android devices, and OpenGL is now used as default output for Linux and BSD systems.
TrueHD and E-AC3 pass-through support is now available for the PulseAudio open-source sound system, there's a new Pitch shifting module, a new Binauralizer audio filter, and a SoX Resampler library audio filter module that's being used as both converter and resampler. Lastly, VLC 3.0 brings HDR10 support for Windows 10 Fall Creator Update with Direct3D11.
A new video filter lets users convert between FPS rates in VLC 3.0, hardware deinterlacing is now supported on the Raspberry Pi with MMAL (Multimedia Abstraction Layer), and there's Tizen audio output support. Check out the official changelog for more details, and download VLC 3.0 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows right now through our web portal, and for Android and iOS from their respective app stores.
