The VideoLAN Forums

I would like to start VLC in background: I want to start it at boot time and use the http interface to wake it up, while still having access to the regular gui interface.

I believe:
would do what I wanted, however it doesn't work on my (fairly standard) raspberry pi (debian 12/bookworm): it still opens the "playlist" view at the start. I checked the same command works on Ubuntu 22.04. Any ideas what might be missing in my system that would prevent VLC from starting minimized?

Daemon mode is only about starting VLC and not waiting for it to exit. You can do the same with nohup or start-stop-daemon.

If you want a headless VLC, then you rather need to use the -I switch to select a different interface.

Yeah, I know. I don't want to change the main interface: I like the qt gui, but want it to start in the background, what -d + qt-start-minimized does on my other machine.