Play only audio with VLC

Is there any way to launch VLC from the command line such that it will not play the video, only the audio, of an MP4 file?

Solution 1:

You can start vlc from the command line by:

vlc --vout none /path/to/file.mp4

So vlc uses no video output module and the video will not be played, only the audio.

See chapter 2 of the user guide for all input and output modules of vlc.

You can bring vlc to nearly everything. I thought there was also a option to make me a sandwich.

Solution 2:

Although vlc --vout none /my/video.mp4 accomplishes sound without video, it still opens vlc's GUI. Try this command to play only audio in your terminal:

cvlc --no-video /my/video.mp4

You can still express it in terms of a vlc video output module:

cvlc --vout none /my/video.mp4

To randomly play a directory of music right from the command line with:

cvlc --random /my/music/directory

Solution 3:

Use --novideo

To disable the video track you can simply do --novideo. This will stop it from playing.

Alternatively

If you do --vout none, you'll likely have poor performance and you'll get scammed with

get_buffer() failed
thread_get_buffer() failed
decode_slice_header error
no frame!

But this will result in no video for the stream to be played with. This won't stop vlc from trying though.