Brief: The latest major release of VLC is has brought a number of improvements including Chromecast support. Here’s how to install VLC 3 in Ubuntu Linux.
The open source video player VLC 3 has been in the development for several years now. The good news is that the wait is finally over for VLC 3. It is now available to download.
VLC 3.0 Features
Here are some of the main new features coming to VLC 3.0:
- Stream local media to Chromecast
- Allows audio passthrough for HD audio codecs
- Default hardware decoding to play 4k and 8K videos
- Limited 360-degree video and audio support
- HTTP/2 support
- Now uses OpenGL
- Support for network browsing with Samba, FTP/SFTP, NFS, and other protocols
- Autodetect external audio tracks (ac3, m4a, aac, dts…), similar to subtitles
- Adaptive streaming
- Improved support for Wayland
- Support for more codecs
You can find all the changes in VLC 3.0 in the release announcement.
How to install VLC 3.0 on Ubuntu Linux
It’s been some time that VLC 3.0 has been released, it should be available in most Linux distributions. So you should first check in your distribution’s software center and install VLC from there.
You can install either the Snap (the first in the screenshot) or the Apt version (the installed one in the screenshot). Snap has the latest version but it’s slow at startup. Apt is fast while starting the application but might not be the latest version.
Installing VLC on Ubuntu using terminal
There are several command line ways to install the latest release of VLC.
The easiest way is to use Snap package of VLC. Snap is a new ‘universal’ packaging system from Ubuntu. They can be used on any Linux distribution that supports Snap. I recommend reading this article to know about Snap packages in detail.
You can use it alongside your current VLC install. The default channel of VLC snap package uses VLC 3+ stable.
If you are using Ubuntu 16.04 or higher, you should already be able to use Snap packages. All you need to do is to use the command below:
sudo snap install vlcInstall VLC 3 on Ubuntu using PPA
If you don’t want to use Snap package, you can use the stable PPA (if you use an Ubuntu-based distribution).
At present, this PPA will just install (or upgrade to) latest stable VLC release.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/stable-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlcInstall VLC 4.0 in Ubuntu right now (highly unstable and not recommended at all)
The work on VLC 4.0 has already started. I won’t recommend using it unless you have strong reasons to try out the unstable release.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/master-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlcI also recommend reading this article about removing PPA so that you can uninstall the applications installed using a PPA.
What say?
I hope this quick tutorial helped you to install the latest
What about you? Are you looking forward to VLC 3.0?
installed vlc 3.0 with snap and works fine here in my 18.04 :) thank you!
Running Ubuntu 18.04 and or should I say, “Oh Snap!”…We give Two Thumbs Up. Thank you for the post.
This article is wrong. This is what happens when you type in
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/stable-daily, you will get:
This package archive contains daily builds made from the last stable branch of the VLC media player.
This package archive is intended for testing the build process and bug fixes in impending stable releases of VLC, with view to integration into Ubuntu through stable via either the Stable Release Updates (SRU), or security updates.
You will NOT find major version updates in this archive, such as from 2.2.x to 3.0.x. If you want a newer major version of VLC, you can use:
– the master-daily archive:
https://launchpad.net/~videolan/+archive/ubuntu/master-daily
– the VideoLAN.org Snap packages:
https://nightlies.videolan.org/
– or build VLC from source manually.
Beware that the builds are fully automated, and do not go through any quality assurance whatsoever. Functional regressions and build are relatively rare but they do happen.
Installing using PPA doesn’t work
Snap’s and flatpaks run real slow on my system. I just want to install native like i always have before. How can we get this installed native. The repository won’t give us 3.0 or newer.
Great media-player :-) , clear sound quality, Thanks a lot.