The *Most* Important VLC Preference
VideoLAN Client is a wonderful piece of software. It does many, many wonderful things. The one I’m concerned with at the moment is playing videos stored on a web server. You just give VLC the address of the file and it downloads it, playing as it goes. This is incredibly useful if you have a bunch of videos stored on one machine on your LAN (which has a web server running on it) and you want to play them on another machine.
There is a downside: when you pause a playing video for too long, VLC will lose its connection to the server. This means that when you unpause the video the buffer plays out (about one to three seconds) and the playback stops. Then you have to restart it and jump around in the video until you find where you were. By which point, VLC will have messed up its video and audio sync and you have to stop and restart the video again, jumping straight back to the point in the video you located the first time you restarted it. In short: a major pain in the ass.
The preference I’m writing this entry in honour of fixes that. In Preferences > Input/Codecs > Access modules > HTTP/HTTPS. At this point, the preference in question is not there, click Advanced to make it visible. Now check Auto-reconnect and Continuous stream.
Now when you pause the playback, VLC will pick up where it left off no matter how long you paused it. Just like it should be.
