VLC 3.0.21 Released with AMD Super Resolution Support

VLC, the popular free open-source media player, released version 3.0.21 after more than half a year of development.

The release introduced AMD HQ Scaler support for Super Resolution scaling with AMD GPUs. Meaning, user can now use this AI-assisted feature to improve the quality and sharpness of playback with NVIDIA RTX series (and more listed in this page), AMD Radeon™ RX 5000 Series Graphics and newer, and Intel Arc, Xe-LP GPUs.

If you have a compatible GPU, then you can enable this feature in Preferences dialog, under Video -> Output modules section.

The release also added D3D11 option to use NVIDIA TrueHDR to generate HDR from SDR sources, as well as D3D11 option allows to disable/enable HDR on SDR and HDR screens on demand, on any GPU.

Other changes in VLC 3.0.21 include:

• AMF VQ Enhancer video filter.
• Fix VAAPI hardware decoding and filters with r600 Mesa driver.
• Improve Opus ambisonic support.
• Fix some ASS subtitle rendering issues.
• Fix Opus in MP4 behavior.
• Add support for HTTP content range handling according to RFC 9110.
• Fix some HLS Adaptive Streaming not working in audio-only mode.
• Improve subtitles rendering on Apple platforms of notably Asian languages by correcting font fallback lookups.
• Fix regression on macOS causing crashes when using audio devices with more than 9 channels.
• Fix exposed UPnP directory URL schemes to be compliant with RFC 398.
• Fix crashes when using caopengllayer.

How to Install VLC 3.0.21

VLC website provides the binary package for all supported platforms:

At the moment of writing, the download page is however not updated for the new 3.0.21 release. Though, the source code is available HERE.

For Ubuntu, user can search and install the Snap package from Ubuntu Software (or App Center), which runs in sandbox environment.

Or, install the native .deb package from this unofficial PPA, by running the commands below one by one in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T).

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/vlc

sudo apt update

sudo apt install vlc

For choice, VLC is also available to install as Flatpak package, though also runs in sandbox environment and unofficial (not verified by VideoLAN).