The VideoLAN Forums

Tried installing a variety of utilities and command-line formats (with 'J', without 'J', 'unxz', 'xz', various flavors of tar), none recognize the file.
Can't find any archives of older versions of VLC either. Would just like to get a 2.2.x version I can install on Ubuntu 16.04. Any help appreciated.

It's as XZ-compressed tarball. Works fine here.

Thank you for the response. I was using a 'howto-build-it' on-line tech support site, and the url provided delivered a damaged *.xz' file.
Thanks again for the prompt response.