How to Stop HD Video from Freezing while Playing in VLC

When high definition videos of large sizes are opened in VLC Media Player—the HD video doesn’t play perfectly at all times. The HD video freezes and skips a few frames while the audio plays perfectly. The video might hang a few seconds and loop around the same point again. This is an error that is not so rare to the users of VLC. Fortunately, there are a number of ways that you can try to fix the video lag.

There isn’t a single or perfect solution to fixing the choppy videos. If you have to play movie files that take up large GBs of space there are a couple of things we can do. The basic idea is to increase the number of seconds videos are cached. It doesn’t matter whether the videos are being played locally from a hard drive or from a network location. VLC needs to cache the video in the player itself while playing. We can increase the cache to ensure that the videos play smoothly. The other thing that improves HD video frame rate is switching the video output to DirectX DirectDraw or OpenGL. Make some changes in the video FFmpeg codec also seems to help.

So, to fix this video freezing issue try a combination of these methods till the video plays smoothly:

Increase Cache Values

Even when playing an offline video, 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. From there, the player accesses it and plays it. It happens constantly as a video is being played. For HD videos, buffering larger portions to the memory helps with the constant lag.

Here’s how to increase file caching

• Open Tools > Preferences [CTRL + P].
  
• In Show settings select the All
  
  
• In Advanced settings, click on the parent option that says Input / Codecs.
• In Input / Codecs scroll down to the options under the heading Advanced.
• Change the values for File caching (ms) from 300 to a higher value like 1000 or 2000. The value is in milliseconds.
  

Note: You can also 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.

Change Video Output Settings

• In the menu bar, click on Tools > Preferences [CTRL + P].
• From the options present, click on Video.
• In Video Settings, under Output change the value from Automatic to DirectX (DirecDraw) video output. Try OpenGL video output as well.
  
• Click Save.

FFmpeg Loop Filter Skipping

• Open up Tools > Preferences [CTRL + P].
• Under Show settings click the radio button that says All to switch from Simple to Advanced Preferences.
• Navigate 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.
  

Additional and Optional Step

• In the same FFmpeg audio/video decoder settings, find Hardware decoding and ensure the value is Disable.

Click Save at the end.