Increasing the priority seems to have worked for me on Mac OS X (10.5.6) with VLC 0.9.8. In terminal, run the following: $ ps A | grep VLC 6028 ?? S< 1:26.62 /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -psn_0_1618315 6107 s004 R+ 0:00.00 grep --color VLC $ sudo renice -n -1 6028 Of course, replace 6028...