The VideoLAN Forums

I've been using vlc happily for years and though I have had a few questions about it before I really liked how it's only the bare minimum of nuts and bolts to get it started. Instant startup and plays just about anything I throw at it. But now I'm stumped more than ever. Because, for the last day or two I have been plagued with ridiculously long startup times. I just timed it to circa 25 seconds. And that's just the player, no video or audio file to be played yet. Just the video. On a system I set up specifically to be able to edit HD h264 video with raid0 drives, 8 gig ram, dual core processor etc...

Like I said, I have been using vlc on this system for close to a year now and it suddenly becomes extreeemly slooow. Once started however it acts likes all's normal. No errors, no nothing. HD video plays fine with full audio sync and everything. The task manager tells nothing about excessive processor usage during startup, it stays at reasonable 00% and about 13 megabytes of memory usage.

Has anyone other than me encountered this? I just now did a full re-install of the player without symptom-change as a result (by the way, when I don't check the box for deleting preferences file, why is my preferences still reverted to its default state after reinstall?)

Delete preferences and cache.

ok, I tried checking the delete pref and cache box and did a reinstall (found another one in the install section, after the uninstall, that was automatically checked and hid itself below other options so I had to scroll down, so I guess I've been deleting them anyway without knowing it.). It's still the same slow startup now as last install.

Remove %appdata%\vlc folder manually.

ok. I did remove the vlc-folder manually and restarted the VLC client. No change on startup time. So I made sure not to have VLC running while I removed it, then started up VLC again and no change then either. I then removed the folder did a uninstall using the control panel, checked an extra time that it was thoroughly deleted before reinstalling and starting up again. Still no change in startup. All it seems to change is resetting all my settings to default, which I actually expected it to do. But alas, it's still a hefty 15-20 second startup.

You run VLC 1.0.5?

Yes, VLC v 1.0.5 Goldeneye

Does it help if you start VLC with --no-plugins-cache or --plugins-cache option?