The latest VLC update quietly improves one of its best new features

Chances are, if you watch a lot of movies and TV shows on your PC, you’ve heard of or use VLC media player. It’s an extremely popular open-source media player that runs circles around Windows’ default media player, and one of its best features is its ability to play a wide range of media formats, such as MP4, MKV, AVI, MP3, MOV, and more.

However, until recently, one of VLC’s biggest flaws was the lack of a dark mode. This meant that if you used your PC in dark mode, when you opened VLC, you’d get slightly flash-banged. Luckily, with its 3.0.22 update last year, VLC finally remedied this and added a dark palette to VLC for Windows and Linux, which turns all its user interface elements, which were previously white, to dark grey or black, like the playback options and menus at the top.

Now, with its latest 3.0.23 update, VLC’s dark palette has been improved even further, and on top of that, there are a ton of bug fixes, playback improvements, and newly added support for Windows ARM64. So, if you have a Windows PC powered by a Snapdragon chipset, you can now use VLC.

“Today, we released VLC 3.0.23, our largest bugfix release ever. It also adds a dark mode on Windows and Linux, support for ARM64 Windows, improvements for Windows XP, and much more,” VLC said.

How to use dark mode on VLC

You can find it under Tools > Preferences

If you want to try out VLC’s new dark mode, you first need to make sure the app is up-to-date. At the time of writing, when you try to update VLC through its auto-update feature in the app, it says the app is already up-to-date. To get the latest version, you’ll need to download it from VLC’s official website and run the VLC installer again to update it.

Once your VLC is on version 3.0.23, go to Tools in the menu bar and select Preferences. Under the Interface option, you’ll see a “Look and feel” section with a checkbox for a setting called “Use a dark palette.” Check that box, then click Save, and your VLC will now be in dark mode. You may need to reopen the app for the change to take full effect.

After using VLC’s dark mode for the past little while, I think its implementation is great and makes the user interface much less distracting while playing media. My only wish is that the app would automatically switch to dark mode when Windows is set to dark mode. Overall, it’s nice to see VLC finally add a dark mode and already release an update to improve it, in addition to squashing bugs and adding support for Windows ARM PCs.