The VideoLAN Forums

do you mean like remotely from another device ?
or you want from the pi to know if a video is playing?

for remote control you have those option:
https://docs.videolan.me/vlc-user/3.0/e ... index.html

or via telnet :
https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Modules/rc/

what you're describing sound like a server thing, which is downloading a different image than it did before, maybe your windows install of vlc has already cached that 2nd cover and so didn't had to re-download it. if you could give us more information (logs, album infos), we might be able to help yo...

I'm not sure to grasp what your issue is with controls if you are in fullscreen and using the GUI the control overlay should appear as soon as you move your cursor

they're minor releases it shouldn't make any difference for you

if you want the latest version an alternative to ppas is to use the snap version: https://snapcraft.io/vlc

to get the 3.0.17.3 : `sudo snap install vlc --beta`

No this was for the issue you were having with the system freezing not the audio. I'm sorry but I haven't quite caught on what your audio issue was

the bug is that alsa can't be a slave but the other way arround works

oops my workaround was to make the video the input slave sorry :

it's weird that it attempts to open a file instead of alsa://hw:0,1 could you tell us what version of vlc are you running `vlc -V`? there was an issue with vlc 3.0.16 and alsa as a slave input which is what the capture device tab do as a workaround you can start vlc that way in the commandline : `vl...

either in the qt interface change the following option : Tools → Preferences → Input & Codecs → Codecs → Hardware-accelerated decoding
or on the commandline:
--avcodec-hw {any,vdpau_avcodec,vaapi,vaapi_drm,none}

are you using vlc through the commandline? if not in the capture device tab you should have listed the available audio input in the "Audio device name" field here from what you're saying "hw:0,1" should be the right value. I can do some testing in the evening I have a similar car...

Have you tried playing those file from the sd card on your mac? maybe the file got corrupted during copy

This options doesn't seams to exists in the official version of vlc, can you double check how it's named, maybe the version you have installed on your raspberry pi has some additions that aren't part of the main project

Do you have the same issue with albums stored locally on your android device or just with the samba share?