Основные особенности:

Поддержка MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, DVD, VCD, mp3, ogg и других
Поддержка трансляции медиа потока со спутниковых каналов передаваемое по протоколам UDP, RTP, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, MMS, RTSP, IPSec и SSL/TLS
Расширенные списки воспроизведения
Видео и аудио фильтры
Субтитры и плагины, еще более расширяющих возможности плеера
Свободное редактирование плейлиста
Mac OS X аудио модуль, обеспечивающий поддержку всех девайсов
Поддержка FTP
Поддержка SSL/TLS
Поддержка SOCKS proxy
Декодер PNG
Поддержка кодека Apple Lossless Audio
Поддержка скинов
Высокая скорость работы
Высокое качество результата
Приятный и удобный интерфейс

Список изменений:

https://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc-branch/NEWS
http://www.videolan.org/news.html
Changes between 3.0.17.2 and 3.0.17.3:
----------------------------------
Demux:
* Fix a regression causing a lack of audio in adaptive streaming
Changes between 3.0.17 and 3.0.17.2:
----------------------------------
Interface:
* Qt: Fix right click support on video
Misc:
* Update YouTube
Changes between 3.0.16 and 3.0.17:
Core:
Fix a regression in parsing secondary source MRLs
Allow brackets in path part of URLs
Access:
Fix support for screen capture on macOS with avcapture
Fix closing of HTTP 1.x connections
Improve HTTP2 memory usage
Improve AVCapture module
Improve AudioCD support (audio/data mixed mode, musicbrainz)
Improve SMB compatibility by changing the read size
Several improvements on the SRT modules (including streamID)
Decoders/Packetizers:
Add support for DTS LBR
Fix some HEVC hardware decoding on Windows and crashes when aspect ratio changes
Fix hardware decoding for some AMD GPU drivers
Add support for new Fourcc for E-AC3, AV1, GeoVision
Fix crashes with VP9 streams
Fix styling issues with subs tx3g (mp4) tracks
Fix playback of live AV1 streams
Audio Output:
iOS/tvOS: add support for spatial audio
macOS: fix some channels ordering for > 5.1 channels
Android: rework audio volume management
Video Output:
Fix a D3D11 crash when the stream changes aspect ratio
Demux:
Major overhaul of the adaptive streaming stack
Support for DAV video files
Add WebP image mapping
Fix missing audio start of Opus audio in MKV/WebM
Fix an infinite loop in MP4
Fix attachments extractions in ogg files
Support Uncompressed audio in mp4 (ISO/IEC 23003-5)
Fix some lip sync issue in rare MPEG-TS streams
Interface:
Qt/macOS: Fixup user provided URLs
Add safe area handling on macOS
Qt: improve preferences search
Qt: fix --no-mouse-events option
Misc:
Update YouTube
Fix Icecast directory parsing which could lead to missing entries
Improve UPnP compatibility with some servers
3rd party libraries (contrib):
Update FFmpeg to 4.4
Update libflac to 1.3.4 to fix CVE-2020-0499 and CVE-2021-0561
Update libsmb2 to fix invalid UTF-8 encoding of some filenames
Update taglib to fix corruptions when editing some OGG metadata
Update dav1d to 0.9.2
Update fribidi to 1.0.11
Update freetype to 2.11.1
Update libass to 0.15.2
Drop pthreadGC2 in favor of winpthreads
Enable Java support for blurays on Apple M1
Update libsrt to 1.4.4
Update twolame to 0.4.0
Update mpg123 to 1.29.3
Update libnfs to 5.0.1
Update libarchive to 3.6.0
Update AOM encoder to 3.1.1

О Portable:

Портативные версии от разработчика (x32/x64). Не требуется установка.

Скриншоты