Fixing full screen video in VLC on Raspberry Pi

Out of the box, VLC seems to frequently crash when running full screen on Raspberry Pi 4’s. Keyboard and mouse input will stop responding, and playback may or may not hang. It’s not possible to force a clean reboot either, so it’s quite an inconvenience.

I’ve had this happen on both the 1GB and 4GB Raspberry Pi models, with fresh installs/re-installs of Praspberry Pi OS.

There’s a quick fix, which is:

  • Open VLC (without opening a video)
  • Go to ‘Tools’ in the menu bar
  • Open ‘Preferences’
  • Go to the ‘Video’ Section
  • Change ‘Output’ to ‘OpenGL video output’
  • Save changes and restart VLC

Sorted!

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