How to Install VLC Media Player Video Player on Ubuntu 18.04 – VLC Media Player is one of the most popular open source multimedia video players. It is a cross-platform video player software and can play almost any multimedia file as well as DVDs, Audio CDs and protocols stream different developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for desktop operating systems such as Windows, Linux, MacOS and mobile platforms smartphone, such as Android, iOS, iPadOS, Tizen, Windows 10 Mobile and Windows Phone.
This guide describes how to install VLC media player video player on Ubuntu 18.04. The same instructions apply for Ubuntu 16.04 and linux distro based on any Ubuntu, including Kubuntu, Linux Mint, and Elementary OS. With this VLC software, you can enjoy watching various kinds of videos as easily and comfortably as can be done on other operating systems.
Requirements
You must be logged in as a user with sudo access to be able to install packages on your Ubuntu system. → How to Create a Sudo User and a Sudo Group on Ubuntu.
Install VLC Media Player on Ubuntu
The deb packages included in the official Ubuntu 18.04 repositories always lag behind the latest version updates released by VLC officially.
The recommended approach to installing VLC on Ubuntu 18.04 is to use a snappy packaging system. This way you’ll always have the latest major VLC version with all codecs, security updates and bug fixes and optical media support installed on your desktop.
At the time of writing this article, the latest stable version of the VLC Media Player video player software is version 3.0.6.
Open the terminal you are using Ctrl + Alt + T keyboard shortcut and type the following command to install VLC on your Ubuntu desktop:
$ sudo snap install vlc
After the VLC installation is complete, you will see the following output:
Output
vlc 3.0.6 from VideoLAN✓ installedAnd that’s it. VLC media player has been installed on your Ubuntu operating system, you can launch this Player by clicking on the VLC Media Player icon (Activities -> VLC Media Player).
When VLC is opened for the first time, a window like the following will appear with information about VLC’s privacy and network access policy.
Make VLC the Default Media Player
To set VLC as the default media player in Ubuntu 18.04, open the Activities screen, search for “default applications” and click on it.
When the “Default Applications” window opens, in the Music dropdown menu select “VLC Media Player”:
Conclusion
You have learned how to install VLC Media Player video player on your Ubuntu 18.04 desktop. You can now use your new Media Player and start watching video streams or listening to video clips of your favorite songs.
To find more information about VLC, visit our page VideoLAN documentation.
