VLC 3.0 Remains Under Development While VLC 4.0 Will Have Better Wayland Support & A New UI

For more than a year we've been looking forward to VLC 3.0, but it's not quite baked yet. Once VLC 3.0 does finally ship, there are already early plans for VLC 4.0.

The VLC Trac roadmap puts the VLC 3.0 release as currently six weeks late after failing to ship in 2015. Jean-Baptiste Kempf presented at this weekend's FOSDEM conference in Brussels to talk about VLC 3.0 and even a few words about VLC 4.0.

VLC 3.0.0 is so far made up of over 6,200 commits, presents mobile convergence, offers HTTP/2 support, rewritten UpnP handling, adaptive streaming support, introduces initial Wayland support, optional systemd support, GPU zero-copy support for common APIs, asynchronous decoding support, and many other improvements.

Talked about for VLC 4.0.0 is a unification of the mobile media libraries, a new interface for the desktop, and more Wayland support. For Windows VLC users, VLC 4.0 is expected to have more Direct3D 11 work.

For those that couldn't make it out to Belgium this weekend for FOSDEM 2016, more details on VLC 3.0/4.0 can be found via these PDF slides.