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There was finally (after like a year) a new minor version of VLC released. Neither the program itself, nor the website, says one single word about what changes have been made. I've spent like an hour now browsing their site and there is just nothing. Nothing. Look: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

How can there not be a changelog? Is this even an open source project at all? I keep hearing praise about this program, yet it's the most buggy and poor media player I've ever used and its website doesn't even have a changelog.

What am I missing?

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    I’m voting to close this question because it's a rant about VLC rather than anything specifically to do with its open-source nature.
    – Philip Kendall
    Commented Jan 21, 2021 at 16:51
  • Look closer. The source downloads are linked on the very same page you link to. A changelog is in no way a requirement for anything and required by any license.
    – planetmaker
    Commented Jan 21, 2021 at 17:52
  • It has one, on my debian linux it is in /usr/share/doc/vlc/changelog.gz !
    – peterh
    Commented Jan 22, 2021 at 6:26
  • Anyways I think it is not so buggy, although mplayer was better.
    – peterh
    Commented Jan 22, 2021 at 6:27
  • Linked from their releases page, it's called NEWS instead of CHANGELOG: code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/raw/3.0.x/NEWS
    – mrm
    Commented Aug 24, 2022 at 18:46

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VLC is a bit more complicated than most pieces of free software. Their wiki describes how you can use git to download a copy of the entire source tree, at which point the changelog can be had with git log (I've tried it, and it works). No doubt if you're more experienced with git than I am (and nearly everyone is more experienced with it than I) you can get a great deal more information about what was changed, when, by whom, and (I suspect) why.

In the downloaded directory, in addition to the source, I get a COPYING file, which is GPLv2, so yes, it is free software. I'm sorry it's not packaged as you were expecting, but everything you've asked for is available.

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  • When you go to VLC's download page as linked by the OP, they have there also a source download in form of tar balls at the very bottom. So... I can only understand the rant with blindness.
    – planetmaker
    Commented Jan 21, 2021 at 17:48

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