VLC Media Player 3.0.19 fixes security issues and improves AV1 support

[harlan4096]

VideoLAN has updated its cross-platform VLC Media Player application to version 3.0.19. The new version is now yet published on the official project website, but interested users may download it from the server directly.

VLC Media Player 3.0.19 is the first update of the popular video player in a year. As such, it includes a large number of fixes, new features, changes and also security fixes.

The new version can be installed over an existing installation. VLC Media Player keeps all settings in this case.

VLC Media Player 3.0.19

VLC 3.0.19 fixes several security issues in the media player. Two library updates, zlib and vpx address the security issues CVE-2022-37434 and CVE-2023-5217.
CVE-2022-37434 is a heap-based buffer over-read or overflow in inflate vulnerability in zlib. CVE-2023-5217 is a heap buffer overflow vulnerability in vp8 encoding in vpx.

The developers of VLC Media Player have addressed a " potential security issue" of the uninstaller DLLs as well in this release.



Besides security improvements, there are lots of changes to report. On Windows, VLC users benefit from hardware decoding when playing AV1 files in the video player. Speaking of AV1, the new version improves AV1 HDR support with software decoding and includes fixes for AV1 GBRP, super-resolution streams and monochrome streams.

Hardware decoding on Windows has also had several issues fixed, including the "too large resolution" error.

Super Resolution Scaling is now support with Nvidia and Intel graphics processing units. The technology aims to improve the quality of videos, for instance by reducing the number of artifacts. VideoLAN released a custom VLC Media Player version earlier this year that came with the feature enabled by default.

Other improvements include support for RIFF INFO tags in Wav files, SMB compatibility improvements for Windows 11 hosts, and MMDevice audio output threading improvements on Windows.

The list of fixes is even longer. On Linux, VLC Media Player 3.0.19 fixes rendering issues. All users benefit from fixes for YouTube video playback. Several crashes has been addressed on macOS and memory leaks in libVLC APIs have also been addressed.

Most translations have been updated and new translations are available for Esperanto, Interlingue, Lao, Macedonian, Burmese, Odia, Samoan and Swahili.

Playback of several support file types is also improved in the new release, including playback of "some old RealVideo files".

You can check out the full release notes here.

Closing words

VLC Media Player 3.0.19 is a security update first and foremost, one that all users of the cross-platform player should install asap. While there are not many attack scenarios, especially for users who play videos locally only, it is still best to patch early to block any potential issues.

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