VLC 3.0.22: Dark Mode, Game Music, and Smoother Playback

This week’s App of the Week takes a fresh look at VLC 3.0.22, from dark mode on Plasma and Cosmic to niche perks like proper playback of classic Doom and Hexen music files.

The FOSS Force Linux App of the Week — VLC 3.0.22

VLC 3.0.22, the latest version of the popular open source and multiplatform media player that’s been in development for over a year-and-a-half has finally arrived.

One of the reason the app has always been popular with Linux users — and probably users on any platform as well — is that it’ll play almost any video or audio format you throw at it (more on that later), and it’ll handle even more.

That’s because for this release the VLC DMXMUS plugin has been backported from the unreleased VLC 4.0. This means the new version can correctly play legacy Microsoft DirectMusic game music formats like XMI and DLS that standard MIDI support cannot fully handle. While playing music from games isn’t necessarily something that mainstream users will use or need, it does indicate how far this app will go when it comes to codec and format support.

The app is multiplatform, meaning you can run it on everything from your Chromebook to your Linux desktop to your phone. Supported platforms include Linux, Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, selected BSDs, Android, iOS, and too many more to mention. It’s also open source. It’s licensed mainly under GPLv2 or later and LGPLv2.1 or later on Linux and BSD desktops, with Apple and Microsoft Store versions using a dual GPL/MPL licensing scheme that includes MPL 2.0.

UI Tweaks

Probably one of the most requested features for VLC is dark mode, which the new version delivers. If you go to Advanced Preferences > Interface > Main interfaces > Qt, you’ll find a toggle for Enable Dark Mode. Of course, the dark mode option only works in Qt environments, such as KDE Plasma. In Gnome and similar environments, you won’t find a dark mode option. Surprisingly enough, the dark mode option did work on Pop!_OS with Cosmic.

After enabling dark mode for Qt environments, you must restart VLC for it to take effect.

There’s also supposed to be a new “file opener” feel to the latest release, but I didn’t find that to be the case on KDE Plasma. On Cosmic, however, the file dialog did look much more like the system’s native file picker, which is a welcome change.

I also found that VLC 3.0.22 plays nicer with Wayland environments. Where previous iterations felt a bit unstable on Wayland, 3.0.22 feels rock solid.

As for codecs, there are fixes for FLAC seeking, JPEG rendering, VOB and LPCM detection, corrected XVID MPEG-4 hardware decoding on macOS, and better ProRes and Matroska handling.

Miscellaneous changes:

• Fix Opus channel mapping
• Fix hardware decoding with VideoToolbox of XVID MPEG-4 video
• Added the dav1d-all-layers option, which ensures outputting of all spatial layers for the dav1d AV1 decoder are of a scalable AV1 bitstream
• Fix DVD CEA-608 captions parsing
• Disable decoding using libdca, libmpeg2, and liba52 by default in favor of libavcodec
• Various fixes for demuxers
• Added AMD GPU Frame Rate Doubler (Direct3D11)
• Improved visualization of low frequencies in the spectrogram
• Avoiding very large fonts in portrait mode
• Assumes subpictures are in SDR
• Several security fixes

To find out more about what has changed, check out the official VLC changelog.

Installing VLC 3.0.22

At the moment, installing VLC 3.0.22 is limited to Windows and macOS via installers. There is a PPA for Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions, which can be added with the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/vlc

Once you’ve added the repo, update apt and install VLC 3.0.22 with these two commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install vlc -t "o=LP-PPA-ubuntuhandbook1-vlc"

As for other distributions, you’ll have to wait until the official release to hit the stable repositories or Flathub for the likes of Fedora, Arch, openSUSE, etc.

I will say that I found version 3.0.22 to be less apt to lag on larger video files. At the same time, installing VLC via the above PPA wound up with a version that was very slow to open. I’m sure that will be resolved when the official release is made available.