This fork builds the VLC interface redesign by Juxtopposed into VLC 4, in its Qt/QML interface.
- Video: I Redesigned VLC After 25 Years
- Design file: VLC Redesign on Figma Community
This is vibe-coded. I decide what gets built and try it out, AI coding assistants (mostly Claude Code, for a stretch OpenAI Codex) write the code. Each step is built for Windows, looked at in the running player and only then ticked in the roadmap below; what was seen and what was not is written down in redesign/VERIFICATION.md. Nobody has reviewed this the way VideoLAN reviews VLC. Take it as an experiment, not as a VLC you can rely on.
It is not affiliated with VideoLAN or with Juxtopposed. The design is licensed
under CC BY 4.0 by Juxtopposed,
VLC stays under its own licenses (see below and COPYING). The SVG export of
the icons and a few ideas come from
Olmo Gutierrez' implementation
of the same redesign.
The preferences window and shortcut editor started from
dsojevic's VLC fork
at 43283e42a8. They now use template controls and a catalog checked against
the local Figma reference. The remaining differences are recorded in
redesign/VERIFICATION.md.
For 64-bit Windows there is a preview build on the
releases page: unpack it and
start vlc.exe, nothing is installed. Read the notes there first, it is an
experiment.
On Linux it builds and runs: the player comes up with the redesign and plays (tried in VideoLAN's Debian image, on a screen that is only in memory, see redesign/README.md). There is no Linux download, as a build is tied to the libraries of the distribution it was made on. macOS, Android and iOS have interfaces of their own in VLC, which this fork does not touch.
To build it yourself on Windows, Docker Desktop is all that is needed:
.\redesign\docker-build.ps1 # everything, takes a while the first time
.\build-win64\vlc.exeMore in redesign/README.md. The work is on the branch
redesign, master gets it in batches.
Help is welcome, with or without an AI assistant. Pick a box of the roadmap
that is not ticked, or something that looks wrong next to the Figma file, and
open an issue or a pull request against redesign.
- The Figma file is the measure: sizes, colors and texts come from it.
- A box is ticked when the part was seen working in a build, not before. redesign/tools has the scripts that click through the player and take pictures of its window.
- What could not be tried is said so in
redesign/VERIFICATION.md.
What the redesign consists of, in the order it is being built. A box is ticked once the part runs in the Windows build and was looked at there.
- Windows build in Docker
- Dark and light palette
- Control bar in a single row: play button, thick seek bar, volume cone
- Icons of the redesign in the icon font
- Top bar: logo, menu, library, folder, title, full screen, window buttons
- Video framed between the bars
- Preview of the frame under the pointer on the seek bar
- Tracks panel (video, audio and output device, subtitles) and its two buttons
- Settings sidebar, opened by the settings button and by "Show Preferences"
- Panel with its four tabs, delays and speeds
- Subtitles: delay, font, colors, size, outline, position, default track
- Audio: delay, default track, equalizer preset, filter switches, pitch
- Audio: stereo mode, equalizer bands, settings of each filter
- Video: flip, rotate, zoom, crop, aspect ratio, colors
- Negate Colors: visible activation and clean restoration on D3D11
- Image Adjust: live brightness slider and clean restoration
- Pixel crop fields: Top and Left changes and restoration
- Flip and rotation with hardware decoding, including restoration
- "Render": the devices a scan finds, "Local" for this computer
- Playing on such a device: there was none to try it with
- Playback: speed, sleep timer, what the bar shows
- The tab as one list, as in the design
- Speed: slider from 0.25x to 2x
- Sleep timer: preset times, a typed one, the time left, pause when it is over
- Audio visualizer: Spectrometer and Disable
- Reverse: the switch is there, nothing that plays backwards was at hand to try it on
- "Show Subtitle Timeline on Seekbar" and "Show Statistics": what they switch on does not exist yet
- Presets for a show
- Queue panel
- The list and its head: how much there is, sort, repeat, shuffle, remove
- Play a row with a double click, move it by its handle
- Add files from the file dialog
- The button, the "Play Queue" shortcut and the menu entry all show it, and it stays while another row is played
- Volume level next to the cone while it changes
- The level while the pointer only rests on the cone: not seen yet, the tests have no real pointer
- Bookmarks and chapters panels, subtitle timeline
- Full screen: both bars on hover, an option to hide the interface
- Resume prompt next to the playback controls
- Menus: the menu of the top bar, the right-click menu, two-tone icons
- Music: cover view, waveform seek bar
- Sidebar over the video: home, videos, music, streams, playlists, pinned
- Pages: toolbar with address line, sorting, view modes and search
- Context menus of files, folders and playlists
- Mini player
- Open network stream, new playlist
- Add subtitles to a file, a folder or a playlist
- Keyboard shortcuts
- The nine reference actions, editing and saving, a conflict cancelled, and the saved shortcut still present after a restart
- Hover controls, tooltips and actual global hotkey actions: not tried
- Settings with its categories
- The 13 categories and their available expanded sections compared with the local reference in the Windows build
- Dark and light appearance, accent selection, native equalizer bands and preamp, with edits still present after a restart
- Missing reference rows, actions and unresolved presets: listed in redesign/VERIFICATION.md and the reference audit
- Customize mode: move the controls around, profiles
- Onboarding
- Inter as the font of the interface
- The build does not quit within a few seconds and can leave a process behind
- "External Tracks" of the subtitles tab has no list of its own
What follows is the README of VLC itself.
VLC is a libre and open source media player and multimedia engine, focused on playing everything, and running everywhere.
VLC can play most multimedia files, discs, streams, devices and is also able to convert, encode, stream and manipulate streams into numerous formats.
VLC is used by many over the world, on numerous platforms, for very different use cases.
The engine of VLC can be embedded into 3rd party applications, and is called libVLC.
VLC is part of the VideoLAN project and is developed and supported by a community of volunteers.
The VideoLAN project was started at the university École Centrale Paris who relicensed VLC under the GPLv2 license in February 2001. Since then, VLC has been downloaded billions of times.
VLC is released under the GPLv2 (or later) license. On some platforms, it is de facto GPLv3, because of the licenses of dependencies.
libVLC, the engine is released under the LGPLv2 (or later) license.
This allows embedding the engine in 3rd party applications, while letting them to be licensed under other licenses.
VLC is available for the following platforms:
- Windows (from 7 and later, including UWP platforms and all versions of Windows 10)
- macOS (10.10 and later)
- GNU/Linux and affiliated
- BSD and affiliated
- Android (4.2 and later), including Android TV and Android Auto
- iOS (9 and later), including AppleTV and iPadOS
- Haiku, OS/2 and a few others.
Not all platforms receive the same amount of care, due to our limited resources.
Nota Bene: The Android app and the iOS app are located in different repositories than the main one.
VLC is maintained by a community of people, and VideoLAN is not paying any of them.
The community is composed of developers, helpers, maintainers, designers and writers that want
this open source project to thrive.
The main development of VLC is done in the C language, but this repository also contains plenty of C++, Obj-C, asm and Rust.
Other repositories linked to vlc are done in languages including Kotlin/Java (Android), Swift (iOS), and C# (libVLCSharp).
We need help with the following tasks:
- Coding
- Packaging for Windows, macOS and Linux distributions
- Technical writing for the documentation
- Design
- Support
- Community management and communication.
Please contribute :)
We are on IRC. You can find us on the #videolan channel on Libera.chat.
Contributions are now done through Merge Requests on our GitLab repository.
CI and discussions should be resolved before a Merge Request can be merged.
libVLC is an embeddable engine for 3rd party applications and frameworks.
It runs on the same platforms as VLC (and sometimes on more) and can provide playback, streaming and conversion of multimedia files and streams.
libVLC has numerous bindings for other languages, such as C++, Python and C#.
Some useful links that might help you:
ABOUT-NLS - Notes on the Free Translation Project.
AUTHORS - VLC authors.
COPYING - The GPL license.
COPYING.LIB - The LGPL license.
INSTALL - Installation and building instructions.
NEWS - Important modifications between the releases.
README - Project summary.
THANKS - VLC contributors.
bin/ - VLC binaries.
bindings/ - libVLC bindings to other languages.
compat/ - compatibility library for operating systems missing
essential functionalities.
contrib/ - Facilities for retrieving external libraries and building
them for systems that don't have the right versions.
doc/ - Miscellaneous documentation.
extras/analyser - Code analyser and editor specific files.
extras/buildsystem - Different build system specific files.
extras/misc - Files that don't fit in the other extras/ categories.
extras/package - VLC packaging specific files such as spec files.
extras/tools/ - Facilities for retrieving external building tools needed
for systems that don't have the right versions.
include/ - Header files.
lib/ - libVLC source code.
modules/ - VLC plugins and modules. Most of the code is here.
po/ - VLC translations.
share/ - Common resource files.
src/ - libvlccore source code.
test/ - Testing system.