VLC 4.0 sneak peek—a look at its work-in-progress new interface
Enlarge / Without significant additional work, the new interface probably won't please all of VLC's existing userbase. (credit: CC-BY-2.0 Guilhelm Vellut / Flickr)
Last week, we mentioned that the extremely popular open source video player VLC is getting a brand-new interface in its upcoming 4.0 release, expected to debut later this year. VLC 4.0 isn't ready for prime time use yet-but because the program is open source, adventurous users can grab nightly builds of it to take a peek at what's coming. The screenshots we're about to show come from the nightly build released last Friday-20210212-0431.
Goodbye file-opener, hello media jukebox
On the left, we have the version of VLC that ships with Ubuntu Focal-3.0.9.2. On the right, we see version 4.0.0-dev, current as of February 12. [credit: Jim Salter ]
When opening up the 4.0 dev version of VLC, the first change that leaps out is an interface shift from "file opener" to "media browser." In older versions of VLC-from its beginnings in 2001 all the way through the 3.x version being distributed now-it opens to a blank player window, with VLC's iconic traffic cone displayed in the center. The new VLC instead opens to a media-browser interface, showing thumbnails of all videos present in the user's Videos folder.
This is the view associated with the Video view displayed along the new version's top menu bar; it also presents Music, Browse, and Discover. Music offers a similar view into the user's Music folder, Discover presents a network browser looking for shares and streams present on the user's LAN, and Discover does not appear to have been fully implemented yet.
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