VLC adds native Arm support on Windows, improving playback on Snapdragon devices
VLC, one of the most widely used media players, now runs natively on Windows PCs built around Arm processors, removing the need for x86 emulation on Snapdragon powered systems. This will be good news for anyone who has bought one of the growing numbers of Windows laptops and tablets with Arm chips, where emulated apps often feel slower and less efficient.
After years without proper Arm builds on Windows, VLC now offers native Arm64 support, allowing it to run directly on Snapdragon based hardware. This removes reliance on translation layers, which add overhead and, annoyingly, can chew through battery life during media playback.
Native support brings practical gains, including smoother playback, shorter startup times, and lower power use (when compared with earlier emulated versions at least). For users of Windows on Arm devices, VLC now behaves more like a first class application rather than a workaround.
The Arm builds arrive as part of VLC versions 3.0.22 and 3.0.23. These officially introduce Windows Arm64 compatibility with a minimum requirement of Windows 10 version 1809. Devices using Snapdragon X series processors can now run VLC without falling back to x86 code.
Alongside Arm support, VLC adds a long requested dark mode option on both Windows and Linux. The updated interface better matches modern system themes and reduces glare during extended viewing sessions, especially in low light environments.
The updates also deliver a large set of fixes and improvements across the player. Core playback behavior has been tweaked, and a wide range of codecs and demuxers have been updated. Issues affecting formats such as WebVTT subtitles, JPEG images, FLAC audio, MPEG transport streams, and various container types have been fixed as well.
On Windows, image rendering issues with D3D11 have been addressed, OpenGL modules compile more reliably, and file handling has been improved as well. Users can now rename, move, or delete files as they are playing, addressing a long standing bugbear.
Hardware decoding fixes span multiple formats, including ProRes, Opus, DVD captions, and XVID MPEG-4. Some older decoding paths are now disabled by default in favor of libavcodec, simplifying maintenance and reducing edge case failures.
Developers also resolved a number of crashes, buffer overflows, null dereferences, and memory issues across codecs, demuxers, and subtitle handling.
VLC changelog
VLC doesn't publish an exhaustive list, but you can browse the changelog it issued with this release here.
Not upgraded to Windows 11 yet? VLC has you covered and not just for Windows 10. The latest release for the media player includes fixes for Windows XP Service Pack 3 -- yes, Windows XP! -- to keep it running problem free on that ancient desktop you can't bear to send to silicon heaven.
You can download the new releases here.
What do you think about VLC finally running natively on Windows on Arm devices? Let us know in the comments.
