An new update to the VLC media player is available to download.

VLC 3.0.18 is the first update to this famous FOSS software in almost 8 months. In that time devs beavering away on the app have buffed out some more rough edges and plumbed in a few interesting enhancements.

By far and away the most interesting addition is initial support for RISC-V.

RISC-V is an open-source CPU architecture, and the focus of considerable development efforts at present. Although mainstream RISC-V PCs aren’t a thing (yet) there are people already trying to use RISC-V with desktop Linux distros — and now they can watch videos in VLC too!

Play a lot of .ogg files? If you do you’ll be pleased to hear (heh) that seeking inside of media format works more reliably as of this update. Seeking in fragmented .mp4 files is also improved, and a bug that stopped some .flac files from playing entirely has been squashed.

Elsewhere, VLC 3.0.18 boasts better rendering and performance on systems with older GPUs; offers ‘major adaptive streaming updates’, particularly with WebVTT; and supports DVBSub captions inside of .mkv files.

A number of security issues have been fixed, too.

For more info on this release you can, as always, check the full VLC change-log.

Want this update?

VLC is free, open source software. It is available to install on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with separate mobile clients for iOS and Android.

Those of you on a rolling-release Linux distro like Arch will (likely) get this update shortly. It’s also available from the Canonical Snap Store, and is officially distributed through Flathub.

Want to compile VLC from source? Have at it; you can grab a source tarball from the official VLC website.