New VLC update adds official support for Windows 11 on Arm and fixes support for Windows XP

The stable VLC client is finally gaining official support for Windows 11 on Arm PCs, after it first went into testing in nightly builds well over a year ago. The popular media player now has a new release candidate build to test, version 3.0.22 RC1, which includes native Arm64 support among other improvements and fixes.

Notably, the update also fixes support for Windows XP Service Pack 3, which the few who are still using that platform will appreciate. The new release candidate build was spotted by linuxiax.com, who say this is the first release candidate build of VLC in a year.

You can check out the release candidate changelog below.

• Add option to use dark palette (Qt)
• Add compilation support for Qt6 and newer versions of Qt5
• Add Windows ARM64 builds
• Fix support for Windows XP SP3
• Allow renaming/moving/deleting of playing file on Windows
• Restrict SystemParametersInfo calls to Windows XP
• Fix Opus channel mapping
• Fix hardware decoding with VideoToolbox of XVID MPEG-4 video
• Add dav1d-all-layers option
• Fix DVD CEA-608 captions parsing
• Fix ProRes 4:4:4:4
• Disable decoding using libdca, libmpeg2 and liba52 by default in favor of libavcodec
• Handle mkv-use-chapter-codec option
• Add A_ATRAC/AT1 support in matroska
• Prevent FLAC seeking logic get stuck
• Handle pictures in FLAC
• Fix VOB/AOB LPCM/MLP detection failing occasionally
• Cut QNap title on first invalid character
• Fix display of certain JPEG files
• Fix playback of very short ASF files (duration less than 1s)
• Fix crashes in multiple demuxers (reported by rub.de, oss-fuzz and others)
• Fix SFTP seeking for large files on 32-bit OS
• UPnP: remove SAT>IP channel list fallback -
• Use a better stretch mode in wingdi
• Fetch missing device information when running in UWP
• Add AMD GPU Frame Rate Doubler (Direct3D11)

As version 3.0.22 RC1 is currently in Release Candidate phase, it's not easily available to download. You can compile it yourself via the VLC GitHub, otherwise you'll have to wait for it to be released officially before you can install or update to it like a normal app.

VLC is one of many Windows apps in recent times to get updated with support for Windows on Arm. Microsoft just celebrated the progress the platform has made in just over a year, with users spending 90% of their time on an Arm-based PC running native apps on Windows 11.

That's a huge improvement over how things were just a few years ago, where most app developers ignored the platform. Now, pretty much all mainstream apps, including VLC, now support Windows on Arm natively.