VideoLAN has released a new version of its cross-platform open source VLC Media Player application. VLC Media Player 3.0.21 is already available on the official distribution server. No official announcement at this point, but this is only a matter of time.
The new version of VLC Media Player comes with a number of improvements and fixes. Notable is improved support for devices with AMD hardware.
The release notes state the following in this regard:
- Super Resolution scaling with AMD GPUs
- New AMD VQ Enhancer filter
Super Resolution scaling is an upscaling technology that aims to improve the visual quality and sharpness of videos. It works best on low-quality videos and videos that are badly compressed.
The upscaling feature was available only for NVIDIA and Intel GPUs in previous versions of VLC Media Player. This changes with the new release and levels the playing field in this regard.
As far as other features are concerned, the following ones stick out:
- The D3D11 HDR option can also turn on/off HDR for all sources regardless of the display
- Improve subtitles rendering on Apple platforms of notably Asian languages by correcting font fallback lookups
- Add D3D11 option to use NVIDIA TrueHDR to generate HDR from SDR sources
- Improve Opus ambisonic support
- Add support for HTTP content range handling according to RFC 9110
The new release includes a few fixes and updates to libraries next to that:
- Fix some ASS subtitle rendering issues
- Fix Opus in MP4 behaviour
- Fix VAAPI hw decoding with some drivers
- Fix some HLS Adaptive Streaming not working in audio-only mode
- Fix regression on macOS causing crashes when using audio devices
- Fix exposed UPnP directory URL schemes to be compliant with RFC 3986
- Fix various warnings, leaks and potential crashes
- Fix security integer overflow in MMS module
You can check out the full release notes here.
Which media player do you use primarily and why?