VLC Media Player 3.0.24

VLC 3.0.24 was released on September 17, 2026, the first update to the 3.0 branch since 3.0.23 in January. We covered it in the news.

FFmpeg 4.4 to 8.1.2

The headline is a jump of four major FFmpeg versions inside a point release. Stable branches normally pin dependencies precisely because moving them is risky, so this is unusual, and it brings a lot at once:

• Codecs: newer AV1 decoding, better VP9 and HEVC handling, and formats that did not exist when 4.4 was current
• Hardware acceleration: much-improved VA-API and VDPAU paths, the difference between smooth 4K playback and a hot laptop on Linux
• Security: several years of fixes in a parser that handles untrusted input by definition. A media file is arbitrary data from wherever you got it, and this is the most important part of the release

Other changes

• Upstream Flatpak build support, so the project can produce its own Flatpak
• Improved Qt 6 compatibility
• Numerous playback fixes

Installing

sudo apt install vlc          # Debian / Ubuntu
sudo dnf install vlc          # Fedora (RPM Fusion)
flatpak install flathub org.videolan.VLC

Distribution packages of the 3.0 branch may link against the system FFmpeg rather than the bundled one, so codec support depends on your distro. The Flatpak carries its own. For converting rather than playing media, see our ffmpeg guide and ffmpeg command builder.

Verify Your Download

Checksums and GPG signatures are published next to each file on get.videolan.org.