jackpatton wrote:

I am currently running 2.2.4 Weatherwax on a 64 bit Win 7 machine.
Should (can I) upgrade to VLC 3.0.3?

I'm currently using VLC 2.2.6 on my home PC running Windows 7 Home x64.
I just used the "Help - Update check" menu in VLC and it reports that
3.0.3 is available. I remember seeing 3.x of VLC was available but
don't remember back then why I choose to not update from 2.2.6.

https://www.videolan.org/index.html

If you go there and click the downward chevron on the download link,
you'll see multiple operating systems are supported, including Win7.

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html

says "VLC runs on all versions of Windows, from Windows XP SP3 to the
last version of Windows 10." The author should probably remove the
first clause since "all" doesn't really apply due to the list of
restrictions in the 2nd clause. However, Win7 is listed as supported.

I noticed in the last VLC update that some videos have hiccups in them
that wasn't present before. For example, when reaching the end of a
video (with VLC set to loop) or selecting an interval to repeat, some
videos don't immediate restart smoothly when they hit the end of the
file or the end of the loop. Instead there's a blacked out interval for
a second or the first frame freezes for a second. I've noticed more
pixelation in old videos that played okay before in a prior version of
VLC. I had switched from using the Windows photo & fax viewer for GIF
files to associating VLC with .gif files, and the first artifact that I
noticed in playback is that there is a long pause before VLC starts to
actually play the GIF.

I suspect the problem is with updated codecs. Although I use the K-Lite
Codec Pack to update the codecs on my PC, those are for the globally
accessed codecs (those called by other media programs that use what have
been registered with the OS). VLC doesn't use the global codecs. It
has its own codec library; i.e., VLC uses its own set of codecs (under
installpath\plugins\codec), so updating the K-Lite package won't help
with getting a later codec for VLC to see if the hiccups disappear. A
newer version of VLC might have a later collection of codec versions
that resolve whatever screwup occured in the prior codec version (but
which were a later version than what I had before VLC 2.2.26).

I always keep a couple older versions of software in case I need to step
backward after trying a new version. I could've walked backward from
VLC 2.2.6 to, say, 2.2.2 but the video artifacts where significant
enough for me to bother. I will try going to 3.0.3 to check if the
playback artifacts disappear.

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.3.html

Some codecs were mentioned, so maybe they updated their internal codec
library with newer codecs that resolve the playback artifacts
encountered in 2.2.6.


UPDATE - After updating from 2.2.6 to 3.0.3 of VLC

As an extremely short glance at VLC 3.0.3, GIFs no longer have a long
delay before they starting playing in VLC. I saw no delay to restart a
loop; however, this didn't happen in every video, I don't remember for
which video formats it happened, and perhaps the videos that I choose
for testing 3.0.3 didn't incur the delay back in 2.2.6. The delay on
loop restart might be one of those artifacts that I'll have to watch for
until I feel the new version no longer has that problem. The new
version did preserve my customized toolbar, so I don't have to figure
out how to define it again to how I want.

Why not read their forums:

https://forum.videolan.org/viewforum.php?f=21)

to see what other users are complaining about, like:

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic...144622#p473561

I've never used whatever is "video effects", so I cannot address that
issue in 3.0.3. In VLC's settings, hardware-accelerated decoding is set
to Automatic, so I can't tell if VLC is using or even needs that method
for the videos that I'm playing on my particular setup. Since it works
as-is, I haven't bothered testing with hardware-accelerated (GPU
assisted) decoding to set to one of the two listed methods or disabling
it. Seems that setting affects whether or not VLC will play 2K and 4K
videos, and I don't have of those yet. Doesn't seem an overt exposure
of whether VLC is using GPU assist or not (i.e., there's no obvious
indicator). Instead the responses that I saw mention to watch CPU or
GPU usage by changing this setting. GPU assist should reduce the CPU
load by VLC.