User documentation

HOWTO

Henri <henri@via.ecp.fr> wrote a VLC-HOWTO.

IRC

You can join the #videolan (anglophone) or #videolan-fr (francophone) channel on irc.videolan.org or on any other OPN IRC server and meet the developers there.

Frequently Asked Questions

These questions are compiled by Sam <sam@zoy.org>.

How do I read a DVD ? Just launch vlc and use the "open disc" command from the graphical interface. If you wish to use the commandline it is like: vlc dvd:/dev/dvd.

How do I read an encrypted DVD ? It's exactly the same as for a normal DVD. You will need write access to /dev/dvd, because of the key negociation.

How do I switch to hardware acceleration ? Use the SDL or xvideo video output plugins. If you're using the SDL output plugin, it should start with hardware acceleration. To get back to software rendering, press 'y'

How do I switch to full screen display ? Press 'f' to toggle fullscreen mode. Note that not all video output devices support full screen.

How do I hide the mouse cursor ? It should disappear after a few seconds if you stop moving the mouse.

How do I read mp3s ? You can't yet. vlc does not support non-system MPEG files.

How do I read MPEG movies with no sound ? You can't yet. vlc does not support non-system MPEG files.

How do I use vlc if I don't want to install Gnome and all this #@!£% *$@&§% !@# bloat ? Just wait for us to write the appropriate interface modules. Or do it yourself :-)

I get a "can't find -ldb" error ! Install libdb2-dev or similar package.

I can't compile vlc ! Try to find out if you have all required libraries, and the corresponding -devel packages installed. The current unstable version of vlc needs the Gnome and SDL libraries.

vlc segfaults when trying to load 3 DVDs at the same time with the alsa drivers and framebuffer output ! OK. Calm down. Try to see where the problem may come from. For instance, try to launch the vlc alone, without any options. Try the --warn 0 option to add verbosity and see what the problem may be. If it doesn't even work here, you can be sure it's not a DVD problem. But if it works, then you can try to open the DVD. Also think about --noaudio and --video that completely disable audio or video in the case of a faulty video output or audio output driver. Hope this can help.

vlc opens the video output window but then hangs ! And ^C doesn't work ! This may be due to the Gnome interface blocking while trying to connect to Esound. This is a bug in Gnome. To bypass it, try to launch esd and then launch vlc again.

vlc segfaults right at the beginning ! Interesting. This is probably a bug. Report it to vlc@videolan.org and try to be as precise as possible regarding your CPU, hardware, distribution, and installed libraries.

vlc segfaults after a while ! Interesting. This is probably a bug. Report it to vlc@videolan.org and try to be as precise as possible regarding your CPU, hardware, distribution, and installed libraries.

I can't read half of my DVDs ! I have the latest 2.4.1 kernel, it should work, I want my money back ! 2.4.1 kernels seem to have a bug in the IDE CDRom driver. Try again with a 2.4.0 kernel before reporting this as a bug.

When asking to read a DVD, vlc starts and does nothing ! Maybe it is spending some time cracking the CSS key. Wait a bit.

I get sound but no image ! This may be due to a bug in RedHat's gcc 2.96. Try to launch vlc with option --yuv yuv to see if it works better.

The sound is jerky It may be a bug. Try the esd.so audio output plugin to see if it works better. If not, then report it as a bug.

The sound does little *clicks* when jumping around in a file It is quite hard to prevent this, but we are going to work on it.

vlc is slow Try to get XVideo output to work if it is available on your platform. Also, if your DVD drive is IDE, make sure DMA is activated (hdparm -d1 -c1 /dev/dvd for instance).

Will VideoLAN support ogg/Vorbis ? Yes.

Will VideoLAN support VCDs ? Yes.

Will VideoLAN support hardware decoding with my DXR2 and DXR3 cards ? Yes.

Will VideoLAN support RTP ? Probably.

Will VideoLAN have cool skins and themes ? Probably not. We are not the skin'n'theme kind of guys. But if you fancy doing it, take the Gnome or Gtk+ interface plugins and hack them so that they use custom pixmapped widgets.

Will VideoLAN support DivX ? We don't know. It would not be very portable, since most DivX implementations are x86-only. Then there is opendivx, but it's not GPL-compatible yet.