Bad performance when simply playing mp3s

[Aorist]

Hello,
I got to know VLC-Player as program that plays everything and thus decided to switch over to it completly but now must recognize that if I let it play simple mp3s while doing my jobs on the PC the player shortly hangs and/or sounds strangely. Mainly this happens when opening a new browser or loading a website that contains lots of pictures or similar objects. Even if I fastly drag the player from any position on the screen to another one or if I fastly scroll down the player's play list.

I was wondering that there are people that appreciate the low system usage of the VLC-Player, at least on machine it doesn't perform like using less system-requirements.

I also searched this forum and the FAQs and manually tried to get this solved by trying different settings in the preferences-dialog, but without any success.

My machine
Acer Aspire
Intel Celeron M 370 (1,5 GHz, 512 MB DDR2)
WinXP SP2

Thanks in advance if anybody's willing to help me in this issue!

[Tappen]

I don't think the problem is the actually playing of the mp3s, it's the user interface windows of VLC you have up that are being updated and re-painted. Have you tried a different skin? WxWidgets is pretty bad.

[Aorist]

Thanks for your reply, but the problem even insists if I run the player with standard-settings. Or did I get that wrong and I do have to disable wxwidgets nevertheless? If so, how?

I tried it once again after reinstalling, when I load any website that is not already in the browsers cache short breaks and disturbances or failures appear.

[DJ]

In your start menu VideoLAN folder you were provided many shortcuts. One should me marked VLC media player (skins). Use it to open VLC. When VLC opens go to preferences and press Save. Then close the player. Now make a new Shortcut with nothing after VLC.EXE IE NO Options. You can now select your skin and configure it if necessary.

Really I don't believe the interface has anything to do with this issue. More likely would be the cache size or the priority of VLC. Both of these can be reset depending on the situation.

[Aorist]

Maybe you are right thinking the reason is not any interface-thing but rather something concerning cache or priority of VLC. I found that checkbox in the settings which enables that VLC has priority but this also doesn't work.

Is it simply my machine? Too small memory or something like this?
(I tried everything to slow the usage of the system down like turning off visualisations and I simplified the look of my Windows,...)

Maybe I should not waste more time (yours and mine) on trying to solve this problem but switching over to another player...too bad.

Thanks a lot for your support!!

[Tappen]

Does the problem happen if you close the Playlist window? That's the user interface I was worried about. It tries to update itself 10x a second from a timer thread in the background.

[Aorist]

yes, it does happen nevertheless.