VLC makes Mac Studio Unresponsive (esp. Dock & Finder)

[jonny1250]

Hi,

I'm running VLC 3.0.18 for Apple Silicon on my Mac Studio (M1 Max, Ventura 13.1). Every time I use it, it leaves the Mac unusable without a reboot. Don't even need to play a video, opening the app is enough. Main symptoms are that the Dock stops responding to clicks (can sometimes be recovered with

Code: Select all

pkill -9 Dock

) and Finder seems to slow down to the extent that trying to even bring up the reboot option on the apple menu takes minutes. This state persists even if VLC is subsequently quit. Restarting Finder doesn't seem to help.

I've tried reinstalling VLC. It doesn't seem to be the case that VLC (or any other process) is particularly hogging the CPU.

What on earth is going on? How can I investigate further.

Many Thanks

[jonny1250]

I've solved it, in case this is of use to anyone else. Still not 100% sure what the critical step was but there.

• Booting into safe mode didn't help, nor did manually disabling all login items
• Running VLC from another login account worked fine
• Deleting VLC's config files didn't help, on its own
• Deleting Finder and Dock plists didn't help, on its own
• Reinstalling MacOS from recovery mode didn't help
• A mass deletion in ~/Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Application Support of anything with "media" in the name, all finder, dock, desktop, window manager plists, as well as the VLC config files again, followed by a reboot has seem to have cured it.

it was very odd - would love to know specifically what was happening, but all well now.