How to Control VLC Media Player Through Console Interface

VLC Media Player is perhaps the most talked about and installed media player software on any desktop computer. Since it is available for all the popular platforms, Windows, macOS and Linux users love it alike. The main reason why everyone loves this open-source player is its ability to play all kinds of media files without requiring any of those codecs. Whether it is a video file or an audio file, VLC media player can play them all. Nobody really has ever come up with the complain that they are not able to play a certain media file with VLC media player.

Then there are tons of options that VLC Media Player provides. There are themes, media playback options, advanced playback controls, media conversion, online media source playback and more. One of these advanced features that VLC Media Player offers is the ability to control VLC media playback through a console interface.

VLC Console Interface

In order to launch the VLC console interface, you can use two methods. One of these include launching VLC Media player and then selecting View → Add Interface → Console. This will open the console window from where you can issue various commands.

VLC Console Interface

Another method to launch the console interface for VLC Media Player is through the command prompt (cmd.exe) itself. You have to first launch the command prompt window and then give the command vlc.exe -I rc and it will open the VLC console interface. The first thing you get to see in the console interface is that if you somehow get stuck in the console interface (launching the GUI mode no longer works), then you can launch it using the vlc.exe -I qt command in a similar manner.

VLC Console Interface

Now if you are wondering what kind of commands you can use in this console window, you can actually find a big list of all the commands just by issuing ‘help’ command – type help and press enter in the console window. You will find dozens of commands from playing videos, to adding items to playlist, changing the volume level to skipping to the next track. Basically, you can do everything through the console interface that you can do through the GUI. For example, in order to play a video file, you can use the command play d:\video.mp4 and in order to stop the playback, you can simply use the stop command.