I have been using the command line options dummy --dummy-quiet to run vlc without a window.
The problem is, because it has no window it cannot receive a windows close message. So I am forced to kill the process.
And the problem with killing the process is that vlc writes the meta data about the video before it closes the file instead of after it opens it. If the process is killed the meta data is not written and things like the frame rate are set to a default value which is wrong if you are saving video at anything other than the default frame rate. When the video is played back it might have a real frame rate of 5fps but the meta data says 30 an it plays by 6X faster than it should.
Is there a command line option to run with a minimized window?