VLC Media Player Gets Native Support For M1 Macs

VLC 3.0.12 is here, with lots of goodies, including native support for Apple Silicon (M1 processor) Macs.

This week, VideoLAN announced a new VLC video player update that will make M1 Mac owners very happy. If you recently bought an Apple silicon MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or Mac mini VLC version 3.0.12 brings the app in line with Big Sur visuals.

The native update isn’t technically necessary, as Apple M1 Macs use Rosetta 2 which “translates” x86 software to run on Arm-powered machines. However, the new update brings performance updates as well, especially when playing back especially high-resolution video files like 4K or 8K video files.

You should notice a bump in performance.

VLC 3.0.12 is now out!
Support for Apple Silicon (Mac M1) and Big Sur, improvements for DASH, RIST, Bluray support, fixes for macOS audio, Windows GPU, crashes and security issues.https://t.co/3zAr8VgzbL pic.twitter.com/TAU8ayKEBU
— VideoLAN (@videolan) January 18, 2021

VLC 3.0.12 isn’t a universal binary, so it doesn’t actually include code optimized for Arm processors. However, users will have to first update to 3.0.12 and then to 3.0.12.1 using an Apple silicon Mac to get the M1-optimized version.

VLC 3.0.12 is here, with lots of goodies, including native support for Apple Silicon (M1 processor) Macs.

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Version 3.0.12 will also bring some improvements to how it handles Blu-ray tracks and fixes some Windows-related crashes when using Direct3D 11. You can check out all the new features available in 3.0 here.