The VideoLAN Forums

A little issue for me - started last night while I was browsing the threads, after updating to 2.0.7 x64.

When I open VLC, it goes straight to playlist, and I can see "My Computer" with sub-sections "My Videos," "My Music," etc.

I clicked there to see how they would populate and nothing showed up in "My Videos." Then I left-clicked "My Music" and it was also empty. So I right-clicked where the files should have populated and saw a bunch of view-by values pop-up in a context menu, and then - BAM.

VLC took over. It seem like it's trying to build a library/index of my massive collection. I hear the hard drive just toiling away, but while it's doing this, everything else on the PC has become unresponsive. The sidebar gallery becomes a frozen snapshot, but provides valuable information about RAM consumption. I see a steep spike in RAM use, jumping from 40% to over 90% while VLC invoked this indexing process. Please note that I have 10GB of RAM, so it is clear VLC is consuming too much RAM during this process, or at least during the start of it, as 50% = 5GB of RAM for me.

Basically, VLC is consuming all of my PC's resources, allowing it to still function, but not in a way in which I can interact with it. The mouse cursor moves, but nothing is clickable. VLC will not close, none of the open windows will respond to any mouse gestures or clicks. CTR + ALT + DEL doesn't work, sleep button doesn't work, yet I can still file-explore over the network at times.

I was tremendously patient with the program, allowing it to do its thing for maybe 10 hours. Eventually, some error messages popped up about my tower-LED hardware having some errors, since it couldn't communicate with the software properly, and I was able to click past them. Then explorer crashed and I finally threw in the towel and knew I would have to restart. I had been trying to avoid that as I didn't want to lose my progress with some browser sessions and I thought maybe VLC would successfully conclude this process. After some trial-and-error, I was finally able to create a user account on my laptop with identical credentials to my PC, ran a command prompt as that user, and then remotely shut-down my PC a grueling 12-hours from when this whole thing began. At least I didn't have to shut down improperly.

When the computer restarted and I tried again to run VLC, it said that an error had occurred and asked me if I wanted to send a debug report to the developer team.

God, yes, I thought, as I clicked okay.

But then Windows informed me that VLC had crashed and I would have to restart the program. So I did, and VLC asked me again about the debug report, clicked okay, crashed again. And around we go. VLC restarted again, this time I clicked no to the debug report, and I was finally back in to the program. But then, wait, what happens now? VLC begins the indexing-hog process all over again! And this time I didn't even click on "My Music" or "My Videos." Now I'm waiting by idly, watching the time during which I was supposed to be productive dwindle away while VLC holds my entire computer and all of its resources hostage.

And this time, remote shut-down is refusing to cooperate. I can still see my PC on the network, but I can no longer explore the shared files. What should I do?

Duh...my fault. I clicked the checkbox for extra QT interface module when I was trying to adjust the default display monitor. I bravely tested the same on my laptop and was able to recreate the conflict (?).

So now to fix it without resetting all of my preferences. Pointers, anyone?

Fixed.

Edited vlcrc in C:\Users\Me\AppData\Roaming\vlc, removing "qt4" from extrainf string.

I won't make that mistake again. And now for the fun part, scanning my laptop hard-drive for errors due to the improper shutdown. And improperly shutting down my PC and scanning all of its drives as well. There goes another half-day down the drain.