VLC Media Player 3.0.17 out with fixes and support for DAV and DTS LBR

A new version of the popular VLC Media Player application is available. VLC Media Player 3.0.17 is a cross-platform open source media player that derives much of its popularity from the fact that it plays most media formats out of the box.

The new version has not been announced yet on the VideoLAN website, but it is only a matter of time before that happens. VLC Media Player users may download the update manually from the download server already. Once released officially, VLC instances may be updated using the built-in automatic updating functionality.

VLC Media Player 3.0.17 is a bug fix release mostly. It addresses issues in several core program modules, including in audio output, access, video output or decoders. One fix addresses a crash in Direct 3D 11, which could happen when a stream changed the aspect ratio.

As far as new features are concerned, VLC 3.0.17 adds support for playing DAV video files and for DTS LBR. DAV is a proprietary video format that is often used by DVR365 and CCTV cameras. DAV files are encrypted and most media players do not support the format. Users had to use video converters in the past, if they did not want to view DAV videos on DVR365 players, or could not, because the players are only available for Windows PCs.

DTS LBR, the LBR stands for Low Bit Rate, is the second addition introduced in VLC Media Player 3.0.17.

Other changes of note include support for uncompressed audio in mp4, HTTP2 memory usage improvements, support for Fourcc for E-AC3, AV1, and GeoVision, support for spatial audio on iOS/tvOS, and updated third-party libraries.

Here is the full changelog of VLC Media Player 3.0,17:

Changes between 3.0.16 and 3.0.17:
———————————-

Core:
* Fix a regression in parsing secondary source MRLs
* Allow brackets in path part of URLs

Access:
* Fix support for screen capture on macOS with avcapture
* Fix closing of HTTP 1.x connections
* Improve HTTP2 memory usage
* Improve AVCapture module
* Improve AudioCD support (audio/data mixed mode, musicbrainz)
* Improve SMB compatibility by changing the read size
* Several improvements on the SRT modules (including streamID)

Decoders/Packetizers:
* Add support for DTS LBR
* Fix some HEVC hardware decoding on Windows and crashes when aspect ratio changes
* Fix hardware decoding for some AMD GPU drivers
* Add support for new Fourcc for E-AC3, AV1, GeoVision
* Fix crashes with VP9 streams
* Fix styling issues with subs tx3g (mp4) tracks
* Fix playback of live AV1 streams

Audio Output:
* iOS/tvOS: add support for spatial audio
* macOS: fix some channels ordering for > 5.1 channels
* Android: rework audio volume management

Video Output:
* Fix a D3D11 crash when the stream changes aspect ratio

Demux:
* Major overhaul of the adaptive streaming stack
* Support for DAV video files
* Add WebP image mapping
* Fix missing audio start of Opus audio in MKV/WebM
* Fix an infinite loop in MP4
* Fix attachments extractions in ogg files
* Support Uncompressed audio in mp4 (ISO/IEC 23003-5)
* Fix some lip sync issue in rare MPEG-TS streams

Interface:
* Qt/macOS: Fixup user provided URLs
* Add safe area handling on macOS
* Qt: improve preferences search
* Qt: fix –no-mouse-events option

Misc:
* Update YouTube script
* Fix Icecast directory parsing which could lead to missing entries
* Improve UPnP compatibility with some servers

3rd party libraries (contrib):
* Update FFmpeg to 4.4
* Update libflac to 1.3.4 to fix CVE-2020-0499 and CVE-2021-0561
* Update libsmb2 to fix invalid UTF-8 encoding of some filenames
* Update taglib to fix corruptions when editing some OGG metadata
* Update dav1d to 0.9.2
* Update fribidi to 1.0.11
* Update freetype to 2.11.1
* Update libass to 0.15.2
* Drop pthreadGC2 in favor of winpthreads
* Enable Java support for blurays on Apple M1
* Update libsrt to 1.4.4
* Update twolame to 0.4.0
* Update mpg123 to 1.29.3
* Update libnfs to 5.0.1
* Update libarchive to 3.6.0
* Update AOM encoder to 3.1.1

Now You: Do you use VLC to play media files, or do you prefer a different media player?

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