[Mojave] Video stutters at start and then is fine afterwards

[dkonofalski]

I have a playlist that I created for a presentation I'm giving that starts with a PNG slide and then moves to several MP4s with the same transition PNG in between each of them. For some reason, the latest versions of VLC now stutter at the beginning of the videos which is unfortunate because several of them have dialog at the beginning that is clipped/missing. The videos themselves play fine afterwords and don't stutter at all but every one of them stutters at the beginning. I've tried everything from enabling/disabling hardware acceleration, upping the cache for local files, and changing/specifying the output filter. I've toggled native fullscreen on/off for MacOS and even converted the PNG to a 10-second mp4 clip thinking that maybe the issue had to do with switching between a PNG and an MP4 and nothing seems to fix it. The weird thing is that once the video is loaded and playing, restarting it plays it fine without the stutter. It only stutters when it's played after another clip and it doesn't matter if I've played the whole playlist or not. As soon as it's done playing, I can restart the playlist and the stutter happens again as each clip is played.

For reference, here's what the playlist looks like:

transition.png
Video1.mp4
transition.png
Video2.mp4
transition.png
Video3.mp4
transition.png

I'm on VLC 3.0.8 Vetinari (Intel 64-bit). If there's any other info needed, I'm happy to provide it.

[gvlierop]

I Have the same proble with stuttering at the start of many vids.
Also when exiting the VLC program , is makes my cursor move tot the left-bottom corner and takes about 2-3 seconds before it will move again.

[dkonofalski]

Yes, exactly. It's only at the start of the videos. I've also noticed, and I think it's easiest to see on videos that start with a title card that's static rather than having some kind of motion, that the video momentarily scales down before going fullscreen during this stutter. I've been trying to get a screenshot of it but it's so quick that it's hard to time it. I may have to do a screen recording to catch it but it does this for every video and I think that this is when the stutter happens - during the period where the video scales up to its actual size from this smaller size. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I'm on a Macbook with 4K displays. It makes me feel like VLC is doing some scaling at the play of each vid to get it to properly display on a HiDPI display and that's what's causing the stutter but I have no way of being sure...