Fixing VLC player crashes on Mac OS X

I’ve been a big fan of the VLC media player on the Mac and have been using it exclusively as my media player. However at some point the VLC player got very funky and suddenly stopped playing all video content. If you tried opening any video file it would open a blank video window and play the files audio for a few seconds before crashing. I tried deleting the app and getting the latest version on the website but that really didn’t seem to help. After a bunch of web searches and looking on several different forums I seem to have stumbled on a working answer.

1) Quit the application if it is running
2) Delete the VLC folder in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences
3) Delete org.videolan.vlc.plist in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences
4) Delete org.videolan.vlc.plist in /DRIVENAME/Library/Preferences

Restart VLC and it should play videos with no problems

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33 Responses to “Fixing VLC player crashes on Mac OS X”

  1. Marc says:

    Thanks a LOT!

    My VLC wouldn’t even open anymore and I just couldn’t work out why. Thanks to you it now runs nicely again!!

  2. yeah says:

    Having the exact same problem, but the fix didn’t fix it!

  3. Brian says:

    Thanks for the research. That fixes my issues.

  4. Islam says:

    THANK U THANK U THANK U THANK U THANK U

  5. Terence says:

    WOW…!! YOu are great!! Solved!! Thanks!!

  6. Terri says:

    U saved us!! Thank a million!!

  7. Eugene Chopenko says:

    Thanks a lot! )))))) had a same problem

  8. foxbat says:

    thanx, mate.

  9. usualy i don’t answer in foruns but.. MY GOD thank you a lot..

  10. Crowmac says:

    Wow! It worked! Thanks to google and you, VLC is back on running!^^

  11. jc says:

    i actually think the only important step is deleting the VLC folder inside the preference folder.

  12. Valery says:

    Does not help. It crash every time when playback position moved

  13. Adam says:

    Thanks a lot! That solved my problem. A similar solution can probably by applied in many other situations where an app behaves erratically. All the more useful.

  14. Nick says:

    Thank you!! I use VLC player all the time but one day it stopped playing any videos, but i followed your tips and its now back to normal! Thanks again
    :-)

  15. Vin says:

    thankyou so much

  16. TranceGemini says:

    The fix didn’t fix my problem! Thanks for posting it though. I’m having a wholly new and different problem now!

    I also uninstalled/reinstalled VLC today and that didn’t help either. I think there might be something else going on, or…VLC’s getting creative in how it screws up.

  17. sure says:

    I downloaded the vlc player on 1st jan 2009. Now i try to play but the file is not opened

  18. [...] One problem concerns failure to play video due to errors in the preferences file as outlined by The Racing Geek. The solution: 1) Quit the application if it is running 2) Delete the VLC folder in [...]

  19. alex says:

    This fix doesn’t work for me.

    Also VLC comes with an applescript for deleting the prefs but that doesn’t work for me either.

    Thanks for the post though.

  20. [...] This fixed VLC for me. Fixing VLC player crashes on Mac OS X (by The Racing Geek) [...]

  21. Ozdaren says:

    Thanks a trillion. It fixed all my VLC problems. What a difference.. YAY!

  22. ΑΛΟΓΟΣ says:

    Thx mate

  23. ... says:

    Thanks so much, worked for me.
    I did not find the last file i had to delete, but it worked anyway.

    Thank you.

  24. James says:

    It seemed to work for a few mins after I deleted the first file, but soon it didn’t. As the person above I could not find the 2nd file. But the problem is that everytime I open VLC Player it creates a new org.videolan.vlc.plist in the Preferences folder, so I doubt it is fixing anything. I am on a new Leopard bought this week.

  25. James says:

    Hi I take what I said an hour ago back. Althou I still didn’t find the last file to delete I do think it is working fine now. Thank you

  26. Luke says:

    THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!

  27. Michael says:

    Thank you so much, worked perfectly!!

  28. ChiLDisH says:

    thats gold!!! thanks

  29. Gerasimos says:

    Great piece of advice mate!

    Should have checked earlier about this issue. In my configuration, it happened each time I loaded the first movie of a sequence of movies. I then was force quitting VLC and in the next attempt everything worked fine!

    Thank you!

  30. falloffboy says:

    Sweet you are my hero! After vlc started screwing up i got the divx thing and it didn’t play audio but now i found this. u r the best thank you.

  31. Gnu says:

    Thank you very much Man!

    I was going to format my mac, but you saved my time!
    Your trick helps me to fix the problem that VLC didn’t respond when I was trying to quit the program after having played a video or audio files.

    Now it’s ok all the time!

    My configuration:
    Macbook Unibody
    Mac OS X 10.5.7
    2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
    4 Go Ram DDR3

  32. Pablo says:

    This solution didn’t worked for me either, what it did work was downgrading to version 1.0.0, if this doesn’t work for your either try an older version, I’ve used this player for a long long time and I remember older versions were a lot stabler.

    Here is a link to a directory of VLC versions:
    http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/

    Also remember to click no the first time you run a freshly installed version and it asks you if you want to update automatically.

    - Cheers

  33. Kasper says:

    Great, thank you very much!

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