Are there any expert configuration guides for VLC Media Player?

Solution 1:

VLC is very complex video player with lots of options. The entire video decoding and display process is extremely complicated. Many times tweaks can be made to enhance performance, however most of the time these tweaks are specific to a specific media file or format. It would be extremely difficult to put together a guide on how to tweak it without being specific to a single format.

IMHO the folks at VLC have done a great job at providing reasonable defaults that perform quite well. If there is some specific aspect of VLC you are looking to tweak, please include it in your question, otherwise, if the defaults aren't cutting it, the VLC documentation is probably the best place to start:

• VideoLAN Wiki
• VideoLAN Documentation
• Outdated documentation

Solution 2:

Beyond the obvious, this is a very, very open-ended question. While VLC does have a focus (as a media player), the library it's based on is very complex, and lets you tweak just about anything. Wanna tint the video neon green? You can do that. Would you want to? Probably not. Most of the tweaks that you can do are very specific or already at the best defaults for the general populace (you might want to set a tint if your TV/screen is tinted itself, i.e., correcting colors, but that's not something you'd find in a guide).

If you're wanting to know what the various settings do, either fiddle with them and see what they change, or google the term to find out more information about it.

The only tweak guide that I've found worth mentioning is enabling proper upscaling on VLC. It used to be enabled by default on older versions, and then for whatever reasons it stopped being set in the defaults. I don't know if they've shipped it as default in recent builds, but here's how to enable high-quality upscaling.

Beyond that, if you want to know how to do a specific thing, feel free to ask, and you'll probably get better answers if we know what you're looking for. VLC is an open-source application - anything that could be put in a tweakguide.com-style guide has probably been already added to the code as a default.