Mods dont ban me pls

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/08/14/vlc-blames-windows-11-bug-for-slow-performance-defends-open-source-and-calls-out-microsoft/

PowerVLC, your VLC3 fork is now getting its third major updates since its launch. New features, as always, and countless hours spent in bugs fixing ensuring the experience is closer to perfect than it ever was. Welcome to the retro future.

On the Video I show some of the key features running on my 10.6.8 Mac Mini Core 2 Duo that has the Broadcom Crystal HD 1080p decoding card, but PowerVLC is still compatible starting Jaguar 10.2, GNU Linux (tested on real hardware for the first time and confirmed working on my Intel Atom N270 Netbook \ _ / ), and Windows XP SP3+.

I announced in some place "1.2.1", but I decided to not do it and go directly to the "1.3.0" considering the amount of things I am now happy to be ready to deploy right now.

Key features

Linux-tested. Finally

Intel i386 build confirmed working great on a real Acer Aspire One Atom N270 laptop. Can play HD content just fine with software decoding on AntiX Linux.

Sorry for the lack of polish until then, but I plan to continue to eradicate bugs to deliver a high level quality on all 3 major desktop platforms.

Clip creation mode

An ergonomical clip creation mode, to easily select parts of the current audio/video you are playing & export quickly (no transcoding needed) a lossless cut of your content.

Improved seekbar

Mac OS X (Legacy + Modern) is now on-par with Qt:

• Chapters marks on the seekbar
• Tooltip that show the seek time + chapter name if available

And on all platforms, it's now possible to preview the pictures just by hovering on the seekbar with most formats/containers. This new option is disabled on slow machines by default though for performance reasons.

Picture-In-Picture (borderless video window)

A new option to hide all controls of the window after the mouse is outside of it during 3 seconds. Just double click, and controls will be back. On 10.6+, even the title bar hides so it feels like true Picture-In-Picture if you also enable the "Always on top" feature.

On Windows, XP is enough to enjoy it fully.

Automatic auto-cropping

Detects automatically the black bars of the content you're playing to find the real aspect radio of it. Works also on IPTV/adaptative streams. Combines very well with the Picture-In-Picture mode for maximum immersion.

Download from Invidious

You can now archive videos from the Invidious instances if you wanna archive & watch them later. Though be aware you need ffmpeg to combine audio + video streams (PowerVLC will automatically call it, but you need it in your path). You can also decide to download just the audio of a video alone for musical contents.

Translations fixed

Translations will finally work so PowerVLC will adapt to your language.

Heavy bugs fixing on real hardware + heavy refinements to make things perfect

Full changelog is available there: https://github.com/Olsro/powervlc/blob/main/CHANGELOG-POWERVLC.md

Download

GitHub: https://github.com/Olsro/powervlc/releases

MacintoshGarden: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/powervlc

Patreon (donations welcome): https://www.patreon.com/Olsro

I wanna thank again the community for all the warm messages & feedbacks, allowing me to fix as much bugs as possible to improve the quality of PowerVLC for everyone

If you find any problem, please file an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/Olsro/powervlc/issues

Enjoy

No AI was involved in writting this post. I'm sorry if it is not perfect, I am french native

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Key features

All tested from my iBook G3 and guaranteed usable on Jaguar 10.2. Any better machine will lead to faster experience. As always, PowerVLC is universally compatible on desktop machines: Linux (arm64/intel64/intel32), Mac OS X (10.2 Jaguar to Tahoe 26), Windows (XP SP3+)

https://i.ibb.co/4wZkfZzf/Screenshot-2026-08-09-18-00-20.png

Invidious

YouTube is important, it hosts so much knowledge and content. It's the main freely available video bank in the internet and we all know how painful it now behaves with old machines because of all the JavaScript to run.

I couldn't manage to find any satisfying way to integrate YouTube directly, so I tried to think out of the box and the best compromise right now in my opinion is to access it through a super-powerful proxy : Invidious

The Invidious ecosystem seems dynamic right now with several public instances available 24h/24.

With Invidious APIs integrated properly into PowerVLC, the Tube is now back and quickly accessible even with the lower G3's in town.

Of course you can also use yt-dlp and PPCMC, this new plug-in is one more option

Jellyfin

A completely integrated Jellyfin client/front-end that can connect through HTTPS using the modern gnuTLS integrated in PowerVLC.

Can find content, filter, search, handle auth, request transcoding from the server to the quality of your choice (if your server supports it of course).

I took all the knowledge that I got from developing JellyDinosaur (a plain HTML/JavaScript ES3 compliant Jellyfin Front-End that I plan to share soon... when I find time). JellyDinosaur was finished weeks ago but PowerVLC is eating all my free time so I couldn't find time to share it to the community.

Anyway, directly integrating the spirit of JellyDinosaur gives even a better experience to the end user. It is more ergonomic & fast, you don't even need a web browser and to bother yourself with TLS and all the kind of quirks that comes with web based solutions and it saves your precious RAM.

Navidrome Subsonic

Auth on your server or one of your friend directly from PowerVLC. Find, search, stream music with gapless playback & download music directly from any Subsonic server.

Podcasts discovery through the iTunes Open API

Find & discover new podcasts directly from PowerVLC conveniently using your mighty indestructible almost 30 year-old G3. No bullshit, no notifications, fast & distraction-free experience using a machine that never let you down.

Play random radios using the new shortcuts

These new shortcuts are available by default from the PowerVLC radios browser. You can then copy these shortcuts to your media library, and it will play a different radio each time:

• Globally
• By the continent of your choice
• By the country of your choice

This way you can conveniently discover new stations & new music.

A PowerVLC Firefox XUL extension

Works with PowerFox ♥, Basilisk, and anything based on the XUL platform*

You can install this browser extension quickly from the "Help" menu, it will supercharge your browser so you can:

• Send links (with right click) to PowerVLC directly
• Right click on videos: a new link will be available to send it directly to PowerVLC
• Use your browser to resolve JavaScript challenges to access protected Invidious instances from PowerVLC

MPEG2 DVD hardware decoding improved

Now all ATI Rage G3 should be supported too, which includes many CRT iMacs so these can now join the party of hardware-accelerated decoding, which means full speed DVDs playback with low CPU usage, low eat, and perfect smoothness. In the heat-waves we're suffering right now, you don't want a heater in your room.

I also fixed the support of animated DVD menus, they were not hardware-accelerated at all before this update.

Crystal HD acceleration card support (Mac OS X)

All tested on my Mac Mini Core 2 Duo where I replaced its wifi card with the BCM970015 card. PowerVLC is able to detect if your Mac has this acceleration card at launch and offers a convenient dialog to install the kext all automatically, you never need to run commands in the terminal by yourself or use a dead old XBMC version to use your Crystal HD acceleration card on Mac OS X.

PowerVLC will always try to use it when it can, it's transparent when you play format that is compatible with what you card can decode. This card is very efficient & gives smooth h.264 1080p decoding even on very weak machines like hackintoshed Intel Atom N270 netbooks.

ALTIVEC accelerated HEVC decoding

Enjoy faster decoding performance on your G4 and G5 macs.

Adaptative streams & IPTV

You can now change the quality manually using menus to fit your needs, and select any quality offered by the streamed content

Builds size reduction

Optimizations were done to reduce the binary sizes. The universal binary has been drastically reduced while keeping compatibility with all Macs. The G4e build was not relevant (+0.5% of performance measured) so it was abandoned completely also.

Countless bug fixes, refinements, and performance improvements

All documented in the full changelog. I heard community feedbacks I got during this week to make PowerVLC the best fast, old machines friendly, & no bullshit product I can gift to the community.

Download

GitHub (contains the complete changelog): https://github.com/Olsro/powervlc/releases

MacintoshGarden: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/powervlc

Patreon (donations welcome): https://www.patreon.com/Olsro

I hope you enjoy this massive overhaul, making my vision taking place of what my dream VLC is.

I wanna thank also the community for its warm messages & feedbacks, allowing me to fix as much bugs as possible to improve the quality of PowerVLC for everyone

i just noticed that my VLC is presenting a more vibrant video than MPV or Windows Player. Initially i thought it was the fact that it was Blu-ray ( i made the comparison by playing the Blu-ray version on VLC and WEB.DL on Windows Player). But then i switched them and realized it was VLC messing up the colors because even the WEB.DL version was more vibrant on VLC. As a last comparison i opened the Blu-ray version on both players and yep, VLC was more vibrant. I have went into preferences, tools, settings, i have changed the video output from automatic to Direct3D11 and then to OpenGl for windows. i went in Nvidia Control panel and set the color range to limited instead of Full, double checked to not have any color filter or image enhancement turned on in VLC, but nothing fixed it. I could use MPV as a fix, but i don't like the interface. Has anyone experienced this and found a fix?

EDIT/FIX: since i haven't found a solution for this Issue and i've received mixed answers across 2 different communities, i've reached the conclusion that MPV and Windows Media Player are displaying media the way a director intended. If you don't mind watching a more contrasty, colorful, punchier film, VLC is for you, but if you wanna see the raw untouched pixels like the director intended, watch with MPV. I also abstained myself from involving AI into this, but in the end I've asked Google Gemini about this and this is the answer i got:

"At its absolute core, VLC does this because of how its legacy video renderer pipeline handles YUV-to-RGB color space conversion and hardware acceleration defaults.

When a video file (like your Loki Blu-ray remux) is stored, its color information is encoded using the YUV color space (specifically Rec.709 for standard 1080p HD). Your computer screen, however, operates on the RGB color space. A media player has to translate those YUV values into RGB on the fly.

Here is why VLC's translation creates that punchier, over-saturated look compared to MPV:

1. The "TV vs. PC" Range Mapping Quirk (Full vs. Limited)

• Video files are mastered in Limited Range (16–235).
• Modern PC displays run in Full Range (0–255).
• What MPV does: MPV reads the metadata, sees the file is 16–235, and maps it cleanly to your display without shifting the color balance or crushing blacks.
• What VLC does: VLC's default video output modules (like Direct3D11 / Automatic) often perform an uncalibrated, hard expansion of 16–235 into 0–255. Instead of remapping smoothly, it stretches the darkest grays into pure black and light colors into hyper-saturated tones. This creates artificial contrast and deeper blacks, but destroys mid-tone color accuracy.
• Outdated FFmpeg Engine & Missing Color Management

VLC 3.0 (the current stable version on desktop) uses an older underlying version of FFmpeg and lacks proper system-level ICC color profile management.

If your laptop screen has a wide color gamut (pushing toward 100% sRGB or DCI-P3), VLC doesn't know how to clamp the video stream into standard Rec.709. It simply blasts the video's color channels across your panel's maximum saturation capability. MPV, on the other hand, reads color space tags (bt.709, bt.601, etc.) accurately and clamps them so a red coat actually looks like the director intended, rather than a glowing neon red.
VLC was designed in an era where consumers wanted video playback to look "flashy" on cheap, dim monitors, so its defaults favor high contrast and pop over color accuracy. MPV was designed from the ground up as a color-accurate tool for video enthusiasts, editors, and archivists, which is why it matches YouTube and Windows Media Player's reference output."

As the title said, when I play a movie file, sometimes it only displays part of the movie. I try to re-play the movie, but fail to get the full display, after I replay about 2-5 times that the movie back to full display.

My environment:

• Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon
• VLC version: 3.0.20 Vetinari

trying to find the easiest way to get this old head back from the windows media player back in the day. does the vlc skins system have the capability to have the opening and closing windows on the side of the head?