The VideoLAN Forums

VLC will sometimes, exit briefly, and flash the Desktop between some movies.
Two Questions
1) Why?
2) How can I fix this?

If this has been asked before, please point to the propper topic and I will read it.

Thank you.

I second that! Is there any way to avoid this?

Is there a way to ask for this to be fixed in a later release?
Even if the screen went black between videos, that would be much better.

We're working on it. With our current video output infrastructure, this is only possible with videos of the same size and the same colour encoding. Future releases of VLC (probably 0.9.0) will support this for any kind of movies.

I too have experienced this, but in a different way.

I watch TV on my laptop, using the VLC player to stream from my Dreambox sat receiver. One channel, yes only one, will quickly swap from the show to the destop and back (only for about 1 second) every time the channel goes to commercial. It is very weird. I don't even see how the player can differentiat bewteen a show and a commercial. It's more annoying than anything. Any thoughts?

This is probably because the commercials are broadcast with a different aspect ratio, and VLC goes and recreates the window as if you switched to playing a different video. I've heard of this with some terrestrial european DVB channels too...