VLC 2.2.5.1 keeps locking up while playing videos

[Lilly Begonia]

This has become very frustrating and I've searched and searched for a solution, without finding one anywhere online. I've also had this problem with earlier versions of VLC player, and it's where the video locks up on me while playing, sometimes for almost a minute, sometimes just for a few seconds, coming back with lots of gray blotches and it really ruins my enjoyment of my videos. I found one site that showed detailed instructions for changing the caching values, but not for my version of VLC, and the settings were not at all the same, so I can only guess at what might fix this problem. In VLC 2.2.5.1 the preferences are far less detailed than the version the site showed, and they didn't even tell what version they were giving instructions for. Meh!

I'm running two Mac Minis on my home network, both running 10.12.4 Sierra playing the videos on Mini 2 from Mini 1 which has 14.2 tb of video on 4 external USB drives on a13 port USB 3.0 hub. The two Minis are connected via CAT5 ethernet and WiFi. So is this a matter of caching values? I've set VLC to highest latency, and I'm not sure what that even means, but it's not helped at all. There seems no way I can fix this. Maybe I should go back to an earlier version of VLC? I'm sure someone else has run into this issue, I know they have with other versions of VLC, but I can't find anything for this version about it. There has to be a fix, doesn't there?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Lilly

[Lilly Begonia]

Well I went looking for alternatives to VLC and found MplayerX, which turned out to be malware. Malwarebytes removed it after it wouldn't start or do anything and I did a scan. Now I'm wondering if I need to change my password on my Mac, and what did they get? I also found MacKeeper as malware, with no idea how it got on my system, perhaps it was installed by MplayerX. I then installed Elmedia player, which is working without the glitches VLC had, but it has no support for my remote. It wants to do Airplay, but I don't know what that is, and don't care.

[Lilly Begonia]

Well, I have discovered Movist on the Apple App Store and it's my new video player, having no such issue as has plagued me with VLC, and it has far more extensive Apple remote support. No more freezing videos, no more gray pixelated screens, it just works on my Macs. So that's what I'm using now. I hope Videolan manages to sort out this issue so many are having with VLC, but I'm not waiting around, I just want to enjoy my 14.2tb of videos on my home network.

[Lilly Begonia]

Well Movist crashed and burned too, proving much too buggy to continue using after it's initial appeal. In the meantime I've noted that VLC's issues appear to be periodic, and do not occur at all times. Since the last time I observed them they seem to have disappeared, and contrary to another poster here's expressed opinion I do not believe there to be missing information in the video files that would account for those issues, such as videos repeatedly stalling out and gray pixilated screens. The very same videos played in another player play just fine, and so the poster's claim that there is missing video information in the file cannot be true as the other players also cannot invent the missing content.

There would seem to be some system conditions and circumstances to which VLC is vulnerable that have yet to be defined.