14 DAY TRIAL // The VLC media player is one of the best of its kind on Linux, but getting the latest version installed on your Ubuntu operating system is not as easy as it should be.
VLC developers are releasing new versions of their software on a regular basis, but Ubuntu developers are not adding them up to the official repositories as fast as they should.
If you are an Ubuntu user, you certainly must be pretty upset by the fact that you can't utilize the shiny and cool features that are integrated all the time. You don’t need to fret any longer because there are a couple of ways of doing it.
When attempting to download the latest VLC version, you will soon find out that only the source is provided. Most of the other links are actually pointing to outdated repositories.
This leaves the user with two options, to compile it from source or to use a PPA. The first option is not all that difficult, as I will soon show you.
Download and extract the application. Before getting to the compiling part, you should first download the dependencies. This is fairly simple and it’s done with a single command:
sudo apt-get build-dep vlc
This will download all the files you’re going to need in order to compile the source package. There are a lot of them, so be patient.
Open a terminal, navigate to the VLC source folder and enter the following commands:
./configure make sudo make install
These are pretty simple operations, but building a software from source can take time.
The other solution is a lot simpler. You will have to add a PPA to your system and install the software from there. Just open a terminal and enter the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/stable-daily sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install vlc
If you have an older version of VLC just replace the last command with “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade”.
Enjoy your latest version of VLC.