Installing VLC 3.0.1 in Ubuntu 16.04

Question

I am trying to install VLC in Ubuntu 16.04. By default, the version being provided from Ubuntu universe repositories is VLC version 2.2.2. But I checked the official website of VLC ( Videolan ), there I saw the latest version is 3.0.1.

I searched online on how to install latest VLC version, I got two solutions, either use a third-party PPA or use snaps. I searched for PPA, got ppa:videolan/stable-daily which installs version 2.2.2 and ppa:videolan/master-daily which installs version 4.0.0 rc1 (please correct me if I have gone wrong anywhere here).

So, finally, I resorted to snaps, installed VLC from it using sudo snap install vlc --classic. But the interface looked very weird to me, moreover, it downloaded 189 MB!

So is there any way to install the latest version using apt-get, the regular way?

Solution 1

There is no official release of latest VLC 3.0.2 for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. However, you can get the latest VLC from the third party packager. To install VLC 3.0.2 in your system (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) write the following commands in your terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-3 
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/vlc-3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc

Now you are done! But, please note that according to the statement by the packager, there is no Chromecast support for this particular package of VLC Media Player on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. If you want that, then please upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Solution 2

In case that you had problems with unmet dependencies like I did, there is solution to add PPA ffmpeg-4 and then you will be able to install it properly:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-4
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/vlc-3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc

Source: https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf/+archive/ubuntu/vlc-3

Comments

[Abhisek Chaudhuri]

Thanks for the answer. I saw there are some inconsistencies in the interface. In windowed mode, it is quite difficult to click on the seek bar. And also the resume playback is not working in the snap version.

[Sridhar Sarnobat]

Yep, that worked for me too.

[Guilherme David da Costa]

ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-3 no longer exists, using ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-4 works