How to Make VLC Player to Work in Vista?

VLC player has been ranked as the most supportive software to play any audio or video files. But due to incompatibility issues, some file extensions may not play in VLC when you are trying in Windows Vista. As far as playing .flv format and converting it to .wmv or .avi format, it works in Vista (or at least it worked for me without any tweaking. I used the version 0.8.6b). But you may face some issues if you try to play some rare video extension types.

VLC Player

Under such case, How to use VLC Player in Vista?

Changing some default settings in the VLC Player does the entire trick. Try doing the following steps:

Step 1: In the VLC Player, Click Settings -> Preferences

VLC Preferences

Step 2: Expand the Video option and Click ‘Output Modules‘
Step 3: select the advanced options by checking.
Step 4: This will activate ‘Video Output Module‘.
Step 5: From the drop down menu, try using either ‘DirectX Video Output‘ or ‘Windows GDI Video Output‘.

Video Preferences

If these options don’t work for you, try Dummy Video Output Function or others.

From How to Geek

18 Responses to “How to Make VLC Player to Work in Vista?”

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1 Nirmal
Apr 26th, 2007 at 1:00 pm

Nice tip. Stumbled!
2 Madhur Kapoor
Apr 26th, 2007 at 4:58 pm

So far VLC has played every file for me including FLV . But who knows what might happen in the future .
3 Thilak
Apr 29th, 2007 at 4:57 pm

VLC has been my favorite, but never tried Vista. I’m yet to receive my free Windows Vista Media
4 ryan p
May 28th, 2007 at 12:43 pm

Thanks a lot for this tip it came in very helpful!!. Just brought meself a new laptop with an OS of Vista and what a nightmare it is getting all my old programs to work on this new OS. i use VLC player a lot and this thread came in very handy indeed thatk you lots and lots.
5 john
Jul 15th, 2007 at 4:59 pm

thanks mate
6 sameer
Aug 12th, 2007 at 11:23 pm

i tried all of these options, but its not working for me?
7 Cher
Sep 27th, 2007 at 2:47 am

VLC seems to have been working fine for me as in sound and picture…BUT everytime i watch a video on it, it completely shut down my computer. The picture freezes and nothing seems to wanna work at all. Is anyone else having this problem? Or does anyone know what this might be caused from and how i might i fix it?
8 Diwas
Oct 24th, 2007 at 4:06 am

thanks fren for very useful information
9 bob
Oct 28th, 2007 at 2:42 am

thanks bro =]
10 Gerry
Nov 17th, 2007 at 10:03 pm

Cheers mate. This solved my problem
11 Ahmed Farah
Dec 9th, 2007 at 11:13 pm

Thanks alot mate. I’ve been trying to fix this problem for some time now,
12 Martin
May 16th, 2008 at 12:11 am

Thanks that worked! Buty it is pretty bad quality now after i changed the video output settings. But it’s better than black screen. thanks
13 Michael
May 28th, 2008 at 8:57 pm

Thank you so much for useful tips. I tried it and its perfectly works for window vista even i thought in the first place wont work but it did. Now i can enjoy watching any movies or listen to music.
14 nitinha5
Jul 4th, 2008 at 9:42 am

Hi,

I m having problems working with VLC,i have XP and when i try to play a video that stop in 2 in 2 seconds what is quite annoying,any tips please……
15 ben
Jul 29th, 2008 at 8:16 pm

hi guys, i downloaded the program on vista, but the program looks diffrent than yours, i mean the tool bar doesnt have File, it has Media instead of File. Wold you please help me and let me know why mine is diffrent than anyone else!