A step-by-step tutorial with easy-to-follow instructions

Feb 14, 2018 17:07 GMT  ·  By

VideoLAN released last week VLC 3.0, the biggest update to the most acclaimed media player for desktop and mobile platforms alike, and today we'll teach you how to install it on your Ubuntu or Linux Mint operating system as a Snap.

Installing VLC as a Snap it's easy, but most importantly it will ensure you're always running the most recent version of the application as soon as it is released upstream by the VideoLAN team. However, you'll have to have Snap support installed on your GNU/Linux distribution, which most Ubuntu distros have since 16.04 LTS.

Canonical's Snappy technologies are available on a wide range of GNU/Linux distributions, including Linux Mint, Debian, Arch Linux, OpenSuSE, Solus, Gentoo Linux, Fedora, and others. Snaps are universal Linux packages that are secure by design and up-to-date at all times. You can enable Snap support on your distro by installing the snapd package from the main repositories.

Here's how to install VLC 3.0 as a Snap on Ubuntu, other distros

If you want to run VLC 3.0 on your Ubuntu operating system or any other distro that supports Snaps (if you already installed the snapd package), it's very easy to install the application. But first, you'll have to remove any previously installed version through the distro's native repositories. Once you've done that, install VLC as a Snap with the following command.

snap install vlc That's it! You can now open VLC 3.0 from the Applications Menu of your favorite desktop environment (KDE, GNOME, MATE, etc.) and enjoy the most advanced media player to date. Dubbed "Vetinari," VLC 3.0 offers Chromecast streaming support, 360-degree video playback, 3D audio support, and HDR video support, among numerous other new features and improvements.

From now on, when a new version of the VLC Media Player is out, such as 3.0.1, 3.0.2, etc., all you have to do is to run the "snap refresh" command (without quotes) in the Terminal app, which will update all the installed Snaps on your GNU/Linux distribution. If Snap isn't available for your distro, you could try installing VLC 3.0 from the official repositories.