How to Install VLC 3.0 in Ubuntu and Other Linux Distributions

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Brief: The latest major release of VLC is going to bring a number of improvements including Chromecast support. Here’s how to install VLC 3.0 in Ubuntu Linux right now.

The open source video player VLC 3.0 has been in the development for several years now. The good news is that the wait is finally over for VLC 3.0. 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 Linux right now

Though VLC 3.0 has been released, it won’t be immediately available in all the Linux distributions. It may take some time before your distribution provides the updated VLC to you.

However, if you try to use it before that, there are several 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 3.0 stable.

If you are using Ubuntu 16.04 or higher, you should already be able to use Snap packages. But for other distributions like Linux Mint, elementary etc, you can use the command below in a terminal to enable Snap package support:

sudo apt install snapd

Once you have made sure that your system has Snap package support, time to install VLC 3.0. All you need to do is to use the command below:

sudo snap install vlc

Install VLC 3.0 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 vlc

Install VLC 4.0 in Ubuntu right now (highly unstable and not recommended at all)

It is surprising that even though VLC 3.0 stable is just released, 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 vlc

I also recommend reading this article about removing PPA so that you can uninstall the applications installed using a PPA.

What say?

I had been waiting for VLC 3.0 for some years because it had Chromecast support. Which would mean I could cast the local media to the TV using Chromecast.

Alas! As VLC 3.0 has been finally released, I don’t have a Chromecast anymore. The charm of VLC 3.0 is lost on me.

What about you? Are you looking forward to VLC 3.0?

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