VLC, redesigned

The interface of VLC 4, rebuilt after the redesign concept by Juxtopposed: the library, the player, the dialogs and the preferences, in Qt Quick, on top of the VLC 4 development code.

Important

This is an unofficial build for testing the redesign. It is not made, endorsed or supported by VideoLAN. VLC 4 itself is still in development: expect bugs, and keep using the official VLC for anything that matters.

vlc-redesign-highlights.mp4

Download for Windows and Linux · The code · The original redesign video

What changed

First run

A short welcome replaces the first-run wizard: choose the folder of your media, the theme and its accent color, and learn the main shortcuts.

Library

• A Home page with Continue Watching, your playlists, your network streams and the newest videos and music
• Recent, Videos, Music (songs, albums, artists, genres), Playlists, Network Streams, Browse and Discover in the sidebar
• Playlists, folders and browsed folders can be pinned to the sidebar
• Back and forward navigation, an address bar, and a + menu to add folders, playlists, files and streams
• Sorting by watched and unwatched videos

Player

• Seek previews: a thumbnail of the video while scrubbing
• A player settings panel for subtitles, audio, video and playback: tracks, delays, subtitle style, picture adjustments, equalizer, speed, A-B loop, sleep timer and visualizations, with presets saved per folder
• A subtitle timeline on the seek bar, to see and shift the subtitles
• Playback statistics over the video
• Bookmarks (Ctrl+B) and chapters next to the play queue
• Continue where you left off, asked when playback starts
• Add Subtitles: finds the subtitle files that match your videos
• A restyled right-click menu, with icons and shortcuts
• The shortcut used is shown on the video

Customize the player

Drag controls from the palette into the control bar, or out of it.

Dialogs and preferences

• Keyboard Shortcuts: search the shortcuts, and change one by pressing the new key
• New dialogs to open network streams, capture devices, convert files and stream to devices
• Preferences grouped by subject, with a search over every option, the less common ones folded, and the complete preferences still one click away

Download

Test builds are on the releases page:

• Windows (64-bit): a zip, unpack it and run vlc.exe. It is not signed: Windows may warn about it before running it.
• Linux (x86_64): an AppImage, for systems with glibc 2.39 or newer (Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13, Fedora 40 and later). Make it executable and run it: chmod +x VLC-redesign-*.AppImage && ./VLC-redesign-*.AppImage

They are made by GitHub Actions from the player-redesign branch: the Windows build with the tools and the prebuilt libraries of VideoLAN, the Linux build on Ubuntu 24.04 with Qt 6.10.

Build it yourself

The code is on the player-redesign branch, also at code.videolan.org/jonata/vlc. It builds like VLC 4: see Compile VLC on the VideoLAN wiki.

git clone --branch player-redesign https://github.com/jonata/vlc.git
cd vlc
meson setup build
meson compile -C build

Status

The redesign is being proposed to VideoLAN in pieces. Not done yet, or known to be incomplete:

• some options of the redesigned preferences have no setting in VLC yet
• the media information, effects and messages windows keep their old look
• developed and tested on Linux (X11 and Wayland); the Windows build is untested

Issues and feedback are welcome in the issues.

Credits

• Redesign concept: Juxtopposed
• VLC: VideoLAN and the VLC contributors. VLC and the cone are trademarks of VideoLAN.
• Footage in the screenshots and the video: Tears of Steel (CC BY 3.0) © Blender Foundation

License

VLC media player is free software, released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (libVLC under the GNU Lesser General Public License), and so are these changes.