VLC Remote Tips

Access Fullscreen from the main page

Turning on fullscreen mode when watching movies is really handy. You can do that with the icon in the main remote page. It's the one that looks like four arrows point outwards.

How to access external drives

(requires paid version)

Unfortunately, VLC doesn't recognise aliases or shortcuts (it just tries to play them), so these won't help you.

There is a dedicated drive button in the browse page that will take you to your full drive list.

You do need to take some steps to make sure that external drives appear in this list:

on Windows

• Make sure that the drive is mapped to a letter.

on Mac

• You have to browse the drive manually from your computer to make sure that the system 'mounts' the drive, or use the next tip...

Mac OS: Automatically mount external drives so that they are available to browse on startup

See this page

Add a whole folder to your playlist

(requires paid version)

just tap on the 'play icon' next to the folder and all its contents will be added to the playlist.

Change the font in the playlist or browse view

(requires paid version)

Just 'pinch' the table and the font will shrink. Useful if you have long filenames...

Stop VLC asking to fix files

this isn't actually a VLC Remote feature, but it is annoying when you are trying to play things remotely. You can control the behaviour in VLC at

Preferences (switch to All preferences in the bottom left)
 Input / Codecs
  Demuxers
   AVI
    Force Index Creation

How to run VLC on a windows machine with multiple live accounts

A user asked...

I'm running Vista Ultimate SP2 x86 with the terminal services hack http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/37189.aspx?PageIndex=30

Basically allows you to have two users logged in and working at the same time - great if you want to remote in from work while someone is using the PC.

How can I still use VLC?

(and the helpful questioner supplied an answer!)

1. Log on as admin
2. Remove VLC Remote
3. Give full admin rights to your shared account
4. Log on as shared account
5. Install VLC remote
6. Test
7. Log on as admin
8. Restore shared account to limited access

Keep VLC as top window in windows

Calder suggested this:

If you run the following from the windows command line it will install VLC as a service and force it to be on top of the other windows. Want to play something? Just launch the app and it will connect to the VLC service. No need to launch VLC first.

"c:\program files\videolan\vlc\vlc.exe" -I ntservice --ntservice-extraintf=http --ntservice-option=--video-on-top --ntservice-install

Enable the "interact with desktop" check under the "Log On" tab of the service properties.

Start VLC automatically on Windows

The easy way is just to drag VLC, (or a shortcut to VLC) to your autostart folder. This will start VLC in it's normal configuration with a window visible.

If you are willing to get a bit more technical, then you can fire up your Windows Registry editor and add the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"vlcRemote background start"="\"c:\\program files (x86)\\videolan\\vlc\\vlc.exe\" -I ntservice --ntservice-install --ntservice-extraintf=http --video-on-top"

Add this line to the reg in windows so there is an auto start for the vlc service for the remote no more have to run before it will work. This will work on windows vista and windows 7 both 32 and 64 bit versions for windows xp remove the x86

-Thanks to Nathanael for the tip.