The VideoLAN Forums

I was wondering why there is a limitation on how many videos VLC Player for OS X can have open at a time. I noticed that the Windows version of VLC Player has a preference to allow more than once instance. I am curious as to why this feature isn’t available with the OS X version. Is it a hardware or a software limitation in OS X that doesn’t allow you to ad this feature to VLC for OS X?

I ask because with Quicktime, I can have as many videos open as I want, but I really prefer using VLC Player due to its superior feature set. I see a lot of discussion about this online, so I’m just trying to get some definitive and absolute information…trying to find out if this is a feature that can be implemented into VLC Player for OS X or not, and why. Any info is appreciated

Unfortunately we do not support mutliple videos at the same time on the Mac. This is because of OS X design decisions (each program is only allowed to opened once).

If really needed, you can get multiple videos by starting VLC on command line, or by copying the VLC.app and starting both copies.

But why couldn't one instance of VLC handle multiple playback windows? That's hardly a novel concept, QuickTime Player was doing that more than 20 years ago.

Well, you also cannot play back 2 audio files with iTunes at the same time.
I think that for normal usage multiple videos is not really needed.

But do you have any use case which actually needs multiple videos?