The VideoLAN Forums

For the past few days, I've been unable to open VLC Media Player on my Windows computer. It worked up until a few days ago. Now--nothing. Unresponsive. It shows up in Task Manager as being running, but it's dead in practical use.

I tried uninstall/reinstall the last time it did this (a week ago) and it worked for a few days, then...nothing.

I have the correct version installed. Now, even if I right-click on a video and ask it to open in VLC (a trick that once worked when the program wouldn't open otherwise). Dead to the world.

What might the problem be? Has VLC become enshittified at last?

I tried opening it as administrator. That worked. I guess that's how it's going to work from now on. A stupid added step for no good reason at all. At least it works.

Nothing has changed in VLC about this matter. I know many Windows 11 systems which are running VLC without any troubles and without the need to run it as admin.
So it's a problem with your system.

VLC worked for awhile--it even opened without the Run As Administrator prompt. Three days ago, that no longer works. It's dead as a doornail.

And I can't be the only person in the world who's having this problem. So no snarky answers, please.

It's a fact VLC works on many Windows 11 computers without any trouble. So the problem must be on your computer.

First, reboot your computer.
Reset the preferences and cache (the manual way):
https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:ResetPrefs
Uninstall VLC.
Then delete the whole C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\ folder if it's still exists, it might be C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\ if you're using the 32-bit version. Check both folders anyway.
Also delete the whole %APPDATA%\vlc\ folder.

Once done, reboot again and reinstall latest version of VLC, v3.0.21 as of today.