When you play high-definition videos on a VLC player, you might have noticed a quirky freezing issue! The video hangs and skips some frames while the audio is perfectly fine. Well, this will occur due to many reasons. One of the reasons might be due to either older version of VLC player is running on your PC or it requires some customization in settings configuration.
Luckily, you can fix the issue of video freezing while playing in VLC using some methods. If you have to play HD videos that consume a lot of space without any trouble, then you have a couple of things to do.
Maximize/Increase the Cache Values
Here, the primary concept is to increase the number of seconds videos are cached. The video needs to be cached by VLC. So you can increase the cache to make sure that the video plays without any difficulty.
No matter whether the videos are being played locally from a hard drive or from a network location, VLC needs to cache it. It preloads a certain portion of the video from the hard drive to your computer’s main memory or RAM. Then, the player accesses it and plays it. It happens constantly as a video is being played, and for the HD videos, buffering larger portions to the memory helps with the constant lag.
Follow these steps to increase file caching…
- Go to Tools > Preferences[CTRL + P]
- Under Show settings, choose All
- In Advanced settings, click on the parent option that says Input / Codecs
- Now, under Input / Codecsscroll down to the options under the heading Advanced.
- Modify the values for File caching (ms)from 300 to a higher value like 1000 or 2000. The value is in milliseconds.
Important:
It is also possible to change the values for Network caching (ms) and Disc caching (ms) to see whether it improves your playback performance. Network caching is for files that are stored on a network but are being played in your current system.
Modifying Video Output Settings
One more thing that improves high-definition video frame rate is switching the video output to DirectX DirectDraw or OpenGL. To do this, refer below steps:
- In the menu bar, click on Tools > Preferences
- Among the options present, choose on Video
- In Video Settings, under Output change the value from Automatic to DirectX (DirectDraw) video output. Try with OpenGL video output as well
- Finally, click Save.
FFmpeg Loop Filter Skipping
Doing some changes in the video FFmpeg codec may also help in fixing the problem
- Go to Tools > Preferences
- In Show settings click the radio button that says All to switch from Simple to Advanced Preferences
- Go to Input / Codecs > Video Codecs > FFmpeg
- Under FFmpeg audio/video decoder find the option that says Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding
- Change it from None to All
- Again in FFmpeg audio/video decoder settings, find Hardware decoding and ensure the value is Disable (optional)
- Click Save at the last
Hopefully at least one of these fixes will solve your video freezing problems!
“While performing the any of the above methods, if at all your video file gets damaged or corrupted, then you can use of Remo Video File Repair Tool and fix corrupt movie file easily that too in few steps.”