During a recent talk at the FOSDEM conference, VLC‘s lead developer gave us a sneak peek at changes coming to the open source, cross-platform media player in the coming year.
Under the hood VLC 4.0 will have some changes to the way video is handled, there will be support for 3D and VR, and the media library that’s already included in VLC for Android is coming to other platforms (as an optional feature).
But the most noticeable change? VLC is getting a new user interface.
VLC has long been known as a Swiss Army Knife media player that can handle just about any audio or video file. But it also looks a bit like something that was designed for Windows 95.
The new user interface is still a work in progress, but VLC developers have shared a few mockups showing what it looks like so far. The updated UI brings more modern features including a semi-transparent overlay so you can see menu items and controls on top of a video, for example.
The UI will also follow design cues from different platforms, so the Windows 10 version should look like a native Windows app, while there are also versions for Android, iOS, and GNU/Linux desktop environments including Gnome and KDE.
Like the media library, users will be able to choose whether to enable or disable menus.
Other new features coming to VLC 4.0 include:
- Support for new media formats including HEIF, WebM and AV1
- AirPlay and UPnP rendering (to go along with the recently-added Chromecast support)
- Support for the Wayland server
- SMBv2 and SMBv3 support
VLC is also dropping support for some older operating systems, so in order to run VLC 4.0 you’ll need to be running:
- Windows 7 or later
- MacOS 10.10 or later
- Android 4.2 or later
- iOS 9 or later (this seems to still be up in the air, you may need iOS 10 or later)
- VLC for Linux will required OpenGL
VLC FOSDEM presentation (slides) (video)
via Phoronix
I haven’t used VLC in a few years now. I switched to MPC-HC and then MPC-BE. VLC had very horrible support for hardware decoding of H265 (HEVC) content for a very long time. Back in 2015 Nvidia released the GTX 960 with H265 decoding abilities, and simultaneously Intel released drivers for H265 decoding with Haswell generation CPUs. VLC supported neither Nvidia or Intel hardware decoding products for a very long time.
VLC already supports .webm
I feel like such a nerd being excited for a VLC update, lol. But having looks catch up to function actually is exciting.
I used to use jetaudio since windows 98 days then switched to VLC in 2015 because the playback speedup in vlc does not change the audio pitch, unlike jetaudio or whatever codec pack I was using at the time that jetaudio was using. I haven’t looked back since.
Frankly, I’d rather they work on their documentation.
I just use Linux and don’t often analyze the internals. Hmm (ddg search…): glxinfo | grep “OpenGL version”
> OpenGL version string: 1.4 Mesa 18.2.6
Happy that I have OpenGL installed:-) I wasn’t sure…
It is well past time for VLC to get a facelift. More important is the addition of newer codecs. I have used VLC for longer than I can remember. Maybe twice have I run into formats VLC could not play. Glad to see the progress.