Fixing VLC player crashes on Mac OS X

Post author By rahulnair
Post date March 17, 2008
51 Comments on 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

Tags crash, fix, Mac, OS X, VLC

By rahulnair

www.rahulnair.net

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51 replies on “Fixing VLC player crashes on Mac OS X”

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!!

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

Thanks for the research. That fixes my issues.

THANK U THANK U THANK U THANK U THANK U

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

U saved us!! Thank a million!!

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

thanx, mate.

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

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

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

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

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.

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
🙂

thankyou so much

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.

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

[…] 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 […]

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.

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

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

Thx mate

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

Thank you.

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.

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

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

Thank you so much, worked perfectly!!

thats gold!!! thanks

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!

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.

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

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

Great, thank you very much!

Worked great for me.
Thanks for posting this. You saved me a lot of time.

TX TX TX
Finally playing VLC without any problem. I tried almost everything

Edwin

Its fixed my problem. Thank you so much for the solution.

Edmund

Didn’t really think it would work but WOW it fixes it, I had to only delete the first one as there wasn’t a second one
Thanks!

But after some time, the problem reoccurs.
Another simple solution is to force the windowserver to a stop
In the ” activity monitor” you see that that program consumes a lot of CPU time, when VLC is slow. Why i do not know.
But the trick works all the time. But not for long…
I have not found a permanent solution.

Edwin

i cant live without vlc. thanks for this. very very much.

Thanks! Still works Dec 2011 w/ slight change!
fyi, as of Dec 2011, “4) Delete org.videolan.vlc.plist in /DRIVENAME/Library/Preferences” is no longer applicable. (osx 10.6.8, mbpro)