How to Reset Videolan VLC Media Player in Windows

Videolan VLC Media Player (or just VLC player in short) is the best third party media player for Windows, Linux, Mac and other platforms. It can play all types of media files, DVDs, CDs and online streams without requiring any video or audio codecs to be installed on your system. It comes with hundreds of settings that you can fiddle around with. For example, you can change the color and position of the subtitles, choose various skins and configure hotkeys to name a few. But if you somehow manage to mess with VLC player’s settings, and it starts to behave in a way that you do not like, then its time to reset your installed copy of VLC media player.

There are two ways to reset VLC media player in Windows:

Method 1:

  1. Run VLC media player.
  2. Select Tools → Preferences from the menubar to open the Preferences window. Alternatively, you can also use the hotkey Ctrl+P.
  3. In the Preferences window, you can click on the Reset Preferences button as shown in the following snapshot,Reset VLC Media Player
  4. Click on the OK button to confirm the resetting of the configurations. You may have to restart VLC media player in order to reload the new settings.

Method 2:

  1. Close all the running instances of VLC media player.
  2. Press the hotkey Win+R to open the Run dialog, type %appdata% in the Run dialog and press Enter.Reset VLC Media Player
  3. This would open the application data folder for the current user in the Windows File Explorer.
  4. Locate the sub-folder named vlc, select it and press the Del key on your keyboard to delete it.Reset VLC Media Player
  5. Now if you start VLC media player, it would act as if it has been installed fresh.

The first method above resets only the preferences while the second method described above resets both the preferences and the cache. So if the first method does not fix all the issues with your installation of VLC media player, then you can try out the second method.

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