The VideoLAN Forums

I use Little Snitch to monitor my network connections, and I've noticed that every so often my VLC instance tries to connect to hbonow.com. It seems to happen weekly(ish)? I'll have to start keeping track of exactly when it occurs, but it's not something that happens every day and I can't force it to happen (I just have to wait about a week until it tries again). It just happened to me this morning:



I'm currently running Version 3.0.20 Vetinari (Apple Silicon), but this has been happening for a while now and hasn't been limited to this version.

I'm pretty sure it's not metadata-related because I have "Allow metadata network access" disabled in my settings. And I've only ever seen it try to access hbonow.com. And I downloaded the app from the official site.

Anyone have any idea what would be causing this?

Metadata related or part of the playlist is the only option. VLC is entirely unrelated to HBO.

Metadata related or part of the playlist is the only option. VLC is entirely unrelated to HBO.

That's what I thought initially. But: 1) I have "Allow metadata network access" unchecked and disabled, so it shouldn't be making those sorts of requests at all; 2) This only happens once a week or so. If it were metadata access I would expect that it would try to fetch make the request again if I reopened the same file; 3) I'm not opening a playlist, I'm opening a video file directly, so I don't see how it could have anything to do with playlist metadata; 4) The file I'm opening doesn't have any metadata, let alone anything referencing hbonow.com.

I don't have any addons installed, but under extensions I see VLsub 0.11.1. Also in the sidebar under "Internet" is "Podcasts" (which is empty), "Jamendo Selections" (has "Jimendo's Finest - Trending Tracks"), and "Icecast Radio Directory" (also empty). Could any of these be causing the request? It seems like when I open those sidebar items they try to make requests to api.jamendo.com and dir.xiph.org, but nothing triggers another request to hbonow.com.