The VideoLAN Forums

I have come into a rather odd problem with VLC and can't work out how to solve it. The issue i am having is with playback.

When i open a DVD and play a video file IE the movie, first episode, bonus feature or a video file in VLC IE AVI, FLV and so on, it will open fine and i can watch, skip through, navigate menu and so on but once 1 single video file has been opened that's it VLC refuses to open anything else. I can choose the next episode and it will do nothing, i can shut down VLC and load the DVD again or another video file and it just won't start.

It's as if VLC can only play 1 video at a time, after this i have two options to get it running again.

1. Restart computer
2. Open a terminal and type VLC

I have re installed VLC but that doesn't make a difference. I can watch DVD/video files on other video players fine like Celluloid but VLC is the problem. Is this a bug or an issue on my end?

Thanks in advance.

VLC seems to have some issues when it reaches the end of the current playlist, being unable to changed state after reaching Ended. There are quite a few threads with various versions of this symptom, but not a lot of responses.

Ah so is this a common problem that needs resolving?

It's kinda annoying that after i play a single video file it's like VLC won't play any more and when i close VLC and try to open it again VLC refuses to open, it's a bit odd though that i can get it working in the terminal lol.

It seems so, but I'm not seeing any responses to other threads where it's been raised. For my app I just had to create a new instance of media_player and media_list_player when the list ends. Ugly but it works.

Ill have to stick to opening stuff via terminal for the time been till it gets sorted, hopefully the devs see all the threads and jump on the issue.

I had the exact same problem on a new Mint installation.

The solution is to go to Tools->Preferences and uncheck the boxes that allow "only one instance".

My guess is that the mechanism used to check for other running instances is broken. Could be some semaphore or something.

Cheers for the VLC Help, i opened up VLC went to preferences and then unchecked the box "use only one instance when starting from file manager" which was the only box checked and it seems to have done the trick so far in terms of being able to load more than 1 video file without the re start or terminal option.

Thank you

Now for another weird issue that's popping up, after i have played a video it will leave a icon in the task bar, i played a second video and it added another icon like in the picture below, i selected it and it opens VLC, i right click and close and it does nothing??

Started looking in other threads since nstewart mentioned this problem has occurred before. This recent thread may explain why unchecking "only one instance" works: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=149762

It seems that VLC may leave another process thread running when it shuts down which is why it thinks another instance is running when you try to restart VLC. The message thread indicates changing the video rendering settings might help. So you might try that.

once 1 single video file has been opened that's it VLC refuses to open anything else. I can choose the next episode and it will do nothing, i can shut down VLC and load the DVD again or another video file and it just won't start.

The GUI may be stuck in playing state if VLC or an underlying library dead-locked. In that case, you will need to kill it with xkill or equivalent.

The most common root cause is buggy user-side display drivers.

Setting hardware acceleration to VA-API fixed it for me.

VLC > Preferences (simple mode) > Input/Codecs > Hardware-accelerated decoding > select 'VA-API video decoder' from the dropdown

This was suggested on reddit.. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comment ... &context=3
Also other people having the same issue - https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comm ... ime_after/