Can you disable VLC's font cache?

Question

I have many fonts installed and VLC's font cache rebuilding takes several minutes.

What is it for? How can I disable it?

Answer 1

Found this after some digging in the VLC forums. (image by me)

Building font cache pop-up

Solution:

1. Open VLC player.
2. On menu bar: Tools/Preferences
3. (At bottom - left side) Show settings -- ALL
4. Open: Video Click: Subtitles/OSD (this is now highlighted, not opened).
5. Text rendering module - change this to "Dummy font renderer function"
6. Save Exit
7. Re-open - done. Progy will no longer look outside self for fonts.

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DISCLAIMER:

You must set your VLC PLayer preferences to "All"

Answer 2

I think you are left with two options:

1. Recompile the program configured with --disable-fontconfig, or modify the source code.

2. Trim down your fonts folder, I don't think you really need all 1500+ there all the time.

   You are probably using less than 33% of them, start by killing the fonts that take the most size...

Answer 3

I suppose you are on Windows 7?

From disable font cache? :

Right click on the vlc.exe and select Properties.
Click the Compatibility tab and check the box for "Run this program in compatibility mode for", then select "Vista Service Pack 1".

I just did this on Windows 7 and not only does the font cache loading thing not come up, but VLC opens instantly instead of having that couple of seconds delay.

If this doesn't work, I would suggest to totally uninstall VLC using Revo Uninstaller Freeware, ensure that the installation folder was really deleted, then reinstall. I must remark that I have tried VLC under a Win7 VM, and it had an immediate startup time.

EDIT

The discussion at Rebuilding Font Cache problem in new VLC seems to indicate that this is a problem of the latest VLC version, and that reverting to version 1.0.5 fixes it.

I want to clarify that this is not actually an error, but is a feature by design (see the portable apps link above). Every time you install a font, you can expect this to happen. To prevent this from happening in newer versions of VLC, you would actually need to recompile the software/find a recompiled version of the software (again, see link).

Answer 4

I guess you mean "Front Cache". I got the same message since version 1.1.0. I found a solution where you need to delete the cache file in the directory %appdata%/vlc/. That worked for me. The name of the file is something cryptic. Mine was something like d031bbba323fd9e5b47e0ee5a0353f11-i686.cache-3

If the problem returns you also can delete the vlc-cache-gen.exe in the Programm Files/VLC folder. VLC will never again generate the cache. I found this suggestion at the same source like the other one above. But I don´t know if that will cause some other problems because I didn´t try deleting the vlc-cache-gen.exe.

Source of solution (german forum): Chip.de - VLC Media player