The VideoLAN Forums

I noticed a bug in VLC where instead of displaying the filename of a video file in its file browser it displays other random information.

For example, I have the full season of a tv show, all files properly named so that the 14th episode of season 3 is named "3x14 - Warhead.mkv", and shows up exactly that way in Windows, Linux, Kodi, and other android file managers. However, due to this bug in the VLC file browser, in this example is shows episode 14 is gone, instead on the line where episode 14 should be I see the name of the app used to encode the file. Whats worse I accidentally told VLC to sort the files by name, and now all the files named after the encoding app are grouped together, so that due to this bug in VLC I cannot determine which file is actually the 3x14 episode.

I'm not sure if this is where bug reports go, but maybe a moderator can push this to the right location for the devs to find out whats causing this bug.

It is not exactly 'random information' if you right click on the video then go 'TOOLS>media information' you will see that the "title" of the video is whatever this random name you are seeing is - VLC by default uses the metadata instead of the actual filename and so whoever encoded your video put the 'title' as this random name that they wanted there instead of properly naming it, you can use mkvmerge to change or remove the title if you want then it will go off the filename or whatever title you put there and the second link I give you says you can change VLC to display filename instead but I havent tried it yet.

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=120417
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=130129

Thanks for the response and links. I'm struggling and failing to find the setting mentioned in the second link. Though what I gathered is that it seems others are also afflicted by this bug, and its been present for quite a while. If intended I would assume VLC would also parse the metadata stored in the .nfo file stored alongside the video file (just as added subtitle .srt files stored alongside the video file are supposed to be parsed). Thanks for the suggestion that I edit the video files, though I'd rather not edit hundreds (or possibly thousands) of files in an attempt to bypass this bug in VLC.