VLC for iOS, version 2.6.0

Today, we will release version 2.6.0 of VLC for iOS adding support for Apple Watch. With Apple Watch, you can fully control VLC on iPhone, browse the library and retrieve info about stored or playing media items.

Since playback control using Apple Watch allows you to start playback while the app is in background, we took the occasion to completely rework the playback process which culminated in the introduction of a mini player. This way, you can finally browse the media library or network services without interrupting playback.

Further, we added the ability to loop playlists and access to PLEX shares requiring authentication. Finally, thumbnails displayed in the local media library now reflect playback progress and will show the last played frame.

Version 2.6.0 of VLC for iOS includes the largest number of bug fixes and improvements we ever shipped in a single update for this platform. They are affecting virtually all parts of the app and will lead to a greatly improved user experience. Please scroll down if you are curious about the details.

One last thing: since VLC for iOS includes a large amount of white artwork which is virtually invisible in Xcode, Tobias developed a fix for that.

This major update is the result of 3 months of work and I would like to thank Tobias, Carola and Pierre for their dedication to make this possible.


Full change log:

  • Added support for Apple Watch – control VLC from your watch!
    • playback control
    • media info
    • library browsing
  • Added mini-player to browse the library during playback (#13367)
  • Added support for looping playlists
  • New ingest mechanism for audio files
  • Improved remote command support
  • Improved thumbnail generation
  • Improved thumbnail and web interface performance on devices with A5 CPU and above
  • Fixed crash when playing media from a folder or music album on iPad (#14394, #14706)
  • Fixed crash when app goes to background while a video is playing (#14643)
  • Fixed privacy leak when using a passcode to protect the library (#14159, #14615)
  • Removed stray popup announcing VLC’s crash all the time while it actually
    didn’t crash before, but was terminated by the user (#13194)
  • Added support for the PLEX Web API
  • Thumbnails displayed in the media library are updated to the last playback position (#14462)
  • Improved reliability when sharing media library on the local network
  • Improved media library search delivering more accurate results (#14593)
  • Fixed ‘crop to fill screen’ on iPad (#14575)
  • Fixed issue which prevented downloading of a few files via UPnP (#11123)
  • Fixed crash when screen is being locked during playback (#14610)
  • A large number of bug fixes affecting most parts of the app (#13194, #14056#14270, #14284, #14355, #14477, #14588, #14589, #14609, #14623, #14624#14628, #14629, #14635, #14638, #14641, #14642, #14654, #14663, #14687#14688, #14713, #14715, #14716, #14733, #14736, #14795, #14800, #14801, #14829)

VLC for iOS 2.5.0

Today, we released version 2.5.0 of VLC for iOS with a strong focus on cloud integration. We added support for iCloud Drive, box.com and OneDrive. As part of iCloud Drive, you can have access to any cloud storage enabled app on iOS 8 and later. For box.com and OneDrive, we added native support, which allows us direct streaming from the cloud without having the user download a media first.

Furthermore, we cleaned-up the playback experience matching recent changes in VLC for Android and added the full 10-band equalizer known from VLC’s desktop ports. While reworking playback, we also integrated support for titles and chapters included in a few Matroska / MKV and MP4 files. Due to popular request, you can also lock the UI and rotation during playback.

One last thing: you can share your media library between multiple devices on the same local network now! If you enable WiFi sharing and keep VLC active, it will appear in the “Local Network” tab of all iOS devices running VLC supporting both device to device streaming as well as downloads.

Finally, we added a couple of new translations to Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Khmer, Faroese, Belarusian, Serbian (Latin), Tamil and Afrikaans along with the usual set of bug fixes and minor improvements.

We hope you like this new version as much as we do.

VLC 2.0.6

Today, we published VLC 2.0.6. This is an important update to VLC’s 2.0 series, which improves the overall stability, fixes minor annoyances and solves certain security implications.

It will be available through the internal updater on Mac OS X later today and is already live on for manual downloads on our main website. The in-app announcement on Windows will be enabled as soon as the load on our servers allows. This release is the first to use our new mirror server distribution system. We finally moved away from SourceForge to our own trusted set of download partners.

Notable changes include:

  • Improved playback for Apple-lossless audio, MKV files including support for Matroska v4, paletted codecs within AVI and FLAC
  • Overall improvements through updated codecs and third libraries, including but not limited to DVD playback
  • Improved Vimeo playlist parsing and HTML SRT subtitle rendering
  • Solved connectivity issue with certain https servers

This update includes the following security content:

  • Fixed crash triggered by specifically crafted ASF files (SA-1302, Credit: Debasish Mandal)
  • Fixed use-after-free crash with Ogg file playback (Credit: Tomi Juntunen)

Additionally, we improved various aspects of the OS X port:

  • Improved fullscreen controller time slider with larger click target
  • Improved lookup of human readable device names in AUHAL plugin (OS X)
  • Fixed subtitle rendering resolution when using OS X’s native fullscreen mode
  • Fixed listing of the lua interfaces (web, telnet and console) in the advanced preferences panel
  • Fixed spatializer audio filter panel
  • Fixed crash within the video output code
  • Fixed BDMV folder selection issue on OS X Mountain Lion, which treats such folders as a AVCHD file as soon as they include an item named INDEX.BDM
  • Fixed bug which caused a hidden fullscreen panel
  • Fixed various minor UI drawing issues (main window, fullscreen controller, lua extensions, …)
  • Allowed VLC to be associated with .dvdmedia packages

Windows-specific improvements:

  • Fixed GPU decoding on Intel HD 2000/3000 cards
  • Fixed uninstallation from different locations than C:

GNU/Linux-specific improvements:

  • Numerous D-Bus and MPRIS2 improvements
  • Reject broken versions of PulseAudio

New translations to Gujarati and Aragonese.

Updated translations for Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Thai, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, Hebrew, Estonian, Spanish, Czech, Catalan, Bosnian, Asturian, French, Romanian, Serbian, Russian, Hindi, German, Slovenian, Norwegian Bokmål, Khmer, Icelandic, Interlingua, Welsh, Ukrainian, Dutch and Danish.