The VideoLAN Forums

The first time I disabled VLC's auto-play feature, it was over a year ago. I had to reset all of my preferences, due to some stupid issues going on either with the video files I have or VLC itself. Regardless, I had to figure out ONCE AGAIN how to disable auto-play.

Perhaps this has been addressed, and everybody knows this now. I am going to post this anyway, hoping it stays somewhere and people can come back if they need help.

THIS IS FOR VLC ON WINDOWS, in the event some google search result brings a MAC or LINUX or some other user here.
With that in mind, all of the results I tried to find were for Mac so....

To disable auto-play for VLC.

Go to Tools>Preferences
-at the bottom left, there is something that says "show settings", select "All"

Scroll down until you find "Playlist", click that and a list of "General playlist behaviour" options should appear.
Find AUTO START and uncheck it.

Trust me, it works..thank god...

I do not have a Tools/Preference option, only Settings and there is nothing in there with autoplay option

Thanks for the tip on Preferences -> Show Setting -> All -> Playlist, but the rest did not work for me.
I found 5th item down = "Play and stop". If you hover over it, it says: "Stop the playlist after each played playlist item", and that seemed to work for me.

Thanks for the posts above. In MacBook Air - VLC preferences - show all - start paused and auto start not selected has worked. No auto start taking place now.

I don't see any related option in preferences. This 'feature' is quite annoying. When navigating through a tree of subdirectories, each time the video player starts playing.

...found it.

Thank you. Now I can finally digitalize my CDs while listening to music.

Scroll down until you find "Playlist", click that and a list of "General playlist behaviour" options should appear.
Find AUTO START and uncheck it.

Worked for me but I also had to check the 'play and stop' check box