VLC media player

It’s cool when it works. I don’t like that the settings I make like equalizer and video filters and playback delay are reset every time I reopen the app. This one isn’t that big a deal but it’d be nice to give it a minor tweak, when I try to add subtitles from Opensubs I have to scroll up when trying to click it because it doesn’t let me otherwise, despite it being in plain view, maybe it thinks it’s under the screen or something idk. Also I made a playlist by accident and now I can’t delete it. Aside from that, the serious bugs are the ones like for some reason if you try to open videos too much it’ll just give you a black image even though you can see every UI aspect fine, through my 1 week of experience the only way to fix it is to just restart your device. Second serious app breaking bug, when accessing my FTP server and tapping too many times I guess? it just crashes the app. :/ Furthermore, two great additions to the app I’d like to see is custom presets, such as audio equalizer presets and video filter presets, etc. + the ability to zoom in by pinching your fingers on the screen, I know there’s the resize button but if I wanna see a minute detail on the screen this just doesn’t cut it. If you think this could interfere with the watching experience there’d always be the lock interface option for anyone having trouble.

I use this mainly for music so my review will focus on that. The different categories that tracks are sorted into are very helpful (album, genre, etc.), and the network section is easy to use while also providing several ways to download/add music. When I listen to tracks with a bluetooth device connected, some songs have a second of silence at the very beginning. Sometimes there’s a split second of sound, followed by another moment of no sound, and then the rest of the track plays normally. Rewinding doesn’t make it play that part; it’s just silence. Playing audio through my phone speaker doesn’t have this problem, so I know it’s not my bluetooth headphones. Additionally, from my understanding, the queue does not show the next actual song when using shuffle play. It just shows the queue as if the shuffle option were not toggled on. Shuffle also appears to include tracks that are added to the queue via the “Play next in queue” option when shuffling. As a result, adding a song to the front of the queue with shuffle on does not result in the track actually being played next. Overall, this is a reliable app, and has been very useful as I have moved away from streaming services and towards buying music. That being said, some fixes/changes to the previously mentioned issues would make it even better.

This is the most advanced & compatible video player Apple has when it comes to playing other companies formats. Also it is the only player that plays clips CONTINUOUSLY on any Apple product. How they managed to do that is worth 5 stars alone. Previous review: Wow. I’m new to Apple & quite frankly the resolution & camera is all it’s got. 2 years ago this was the only player that I could figure out to work & the highest rated. I mean after transferring all my mp4s it couldn’t find them. It or the iPad or iPhone corrupted half my files on a separate disc after I discovered a way into not being forced to upload them to iCloud for a price. Like $1000 for my phone & $500 for the pad wasnt enough? Or having the glory of being a $3-trillion company to smear it in bill gates face wasn’t enough ya gotta try to force new customers to buy storage? I have my own storage stop harassing me it gets old & it’s rude, very rude. Anyways…. So a few days ago this app just stops working. I have 2.86GB of free space I mean come on… to cheap to give me 64GB? Or want me to buy iCloud by building less storage? Idk I’m tired of this crap. This app is like Dinosaur Windows Media Player. It plays good but very few controls to mess with it really is like the old days. Very shocking & really pisses me off about Apple. Wow

I use VLC mainly as a music library, and up until a few months ago, it served that purpose fantastically. However, I’ve recently had several issues with playback. While trying to listen to a playlist, the app will frequently randomly stop playing music after 1-5 tracks, requiring me to either enter the app to reselect the desired music or reboot the application entirely, as this occasionally is in conjunction with the whole thing becoming unresponsive. This is frustrating, especially as I tend to use it most at work when my hands are occupied. Additionally, trying to listen to an album in order — if I can get the app to register that I’ve toggled the shuffle function off, which it occasionally doesn’t, despite displaying as such — is an exercise in futility, as for some unknown reason, the app starts skipping every other song. I’m trying to listen to musicals. Needless to say, this dysfunction is not ideal. Again, this is not a problem I had before fall 2023, and I suspect an update of said time period is to blame; would be nice if Apple (my detested) let users revert to previous app states so I could investigate this more thoroughly. It should also be noted that I am using an iPhone 6.

Files are organized automatically instead of following your folder structures. That means you can’t manually group nor organize anything. Further, file names aren’t displayed (even when renaming…) if the mp3 files have media metadata. So if you renamed your files to be in a specific order before transferring to your phone, you have no clue if that order is maintained or not. Lastly, you can copy a file but you can’t move it. Say you have a random set of audio files and want to move one into a Best folder after listening to it. Can’t do it. Instead you can share-copy it, then you end up with two identical files in the UI and you don’t know which is the original one to delete. I’m not using playlists because when I sync files between PCs/devices/apps playlists always break and you’ve got to sync the media files as well anyway. It’s just way easier to use folders, assuming the app supports them which VLC doesn’t. Sadly that makes it unusable for me despite it being one of, if not the best, media player for all platforms. If you have time, please add a folder view and playback by folder.

Awesome new interface, but best is the speed improvements while playing video from accessing the network. It used to take between 10-20seconds to start a video file on a network drive and scrubbing/skipping forward or backward had noticeable latency - now that’s all gone, everything is near instantaneous! Scrubbing is amazing to find a specific point in a video quickly! Great update and work! Some feedback for future improvements: - if you have password lock on for opening VLC, it feels like content should pause or stop playing if it’s locked. For example minimizing the app locks it, but content keeps playing in the background. If you try open open up the app again, password is requested but audio content is still playing. Feels like password protect is leaving a small loophole in its privacy. - when playing media back in shuffle mode, pressing back used to (a few versions ago) take you to the last video you watched but it now just goes to the video before it when sorted by file name. It feels like a good use-case to cache what was watched so that you can rewatch one quickly if you wanted by pressing back once or multiples times to go back multiple videos. - it would be nice to have more configurable playback controls with gestures. Instead of just turning them on and off, be able to assign what gestures do. For instance, If I want swiping up to jump forward 1 min instead of increasing volume

Although the app has been my go to for years it still has issues plaguing it from the redesign. Under the network tab when downloading from a media server there are issues regarding the reliability of videos downloading as well as some files become hidden after downloading. First issue is that when pressing the download button for multiple videos in a row some of the videos are not queued properly for download and are skipped over leading to them not appearing within the VLC library. Another bug is that some files are hidden. Even upon a rescan on the library they do not appear. However, removing them from the VLC folder and then putting it back in using apples files app will lead to the file being visible within the app. When downloading a file for a second time from a media server/NAS and the file did not appear the first time the app will produce a second file ending in an underscore and then a subsequent number (e.g. Captain America_1). Finally, in terms of features it would be nice to have Picture in Picture video so that users can multitask.

More fiddling with the app revealed that the button for looping only appears in the video controls when the player is in horizontal orientation, not vertical. Presumably this is because there is more room to fit buttons in the bottom of the screen there than in vertical orientation. Shame that it got somewhat "buried" so me and at least one other reviewer I saw thought it was removed and shot off inaccurate reviews. Anyway, here is your full, very well deserved, five stars. May this app remain as fine or better for many years to come. IGNORE AFTER THIS POINT; NOT CORRECT: -I used the video looping feature often, both on single videos and playlists, so the choice to remove such a useful feature that has been in this app for as long as I've had it is disappointing. If the looping feature was left in, this update would have gotten a full five stars from me, not four.-

You play long audio. You pause and go do something else, you open VLC again later. Can’t just press play and start where you left off. You have to go find that specific audio you were playing in a terribly designed UI to continue were you left off. The grid layout for your files have just been updated to basically be useless after the latest major update. Now it’s 2 rows of files that can barely show the first word of every file name. If you turn on text scrolling to mitigate this crappy new design you will immediately start to feel sea sick as the whole screen starts to scroll at different rates depending on the length of the file name and you won’t be able to browse in a meaningful way to find something you are in the mood for. You would have to know exactly what you are looking for and then do a specific search for that file name. I downloaded VLC on iOS for FLAC playback and I have to probably pay 10 bucks or something for a proper solution. Apple doesn’t respect global standards and VLC is designed by random people’s whims.

This app works really well as a client for a NAS that has movies on it. All you need is a computer that serves files via SMB. The favorites feature also makes it so that you don’t need to manually wade through the files on disk, you can jump directly there (and the latest version fixes a pesky bug here). The UI isn’t the greatest, it’s typical open-source UI that likes to put all the options up front rather than organizing them nicely. But it’s not that bad. The gestures for jumping back or forward 10s are also particularly hidden, too. The biggest omission from this software, though, is the lack of picture-in-picture support. Movies will continue playing in the background, but you can’t minimize it and keep viewing video in another window while in another app. :(

Why does it lack the ability to add/import local subtitles? Why can I not download a stream and convert it into a mp4…etc…? Update/Response… I use an encrypted cloud service to store videos.. Although the video may have a name within the website or app, When I want to share/view the video, it creates a random URL with too many characters, so I cannot name the subtitle the same name as the URL… There is no option to import a subtitle regardless of the name of the video, the source of the video, and the name of the subtitle… When I play a video, and I click on the subtitles icon, There should be an option to browse for a subtitle file. whether it’s in SSA, or an SRT, regardless of whether it’s shares the same name of the video. This was the reply I got from you back in September of 2022…: "You are absolutely right. We are going to add that feature." So far this feature has yet to be added… I don’t expect much to change, as this is after all a free piece of software; and developers put their own precious time into something that nobody pays for… This is not a criticism, it’s an observation… It’s probably the best player hands down on windows/Mac/Linux… Thanks for all the hard work that has gone into making video playing tasks simpler… it has saved me countless hours needless headaches… for that a salute you.. 🫡🖖🏼

I love VLC. I’ve used it on every computer I’ve owned for the past…10 years? I’ve sure there have been updates to the program, but it’s a great system and whatever updates there were, didn’t change the interface too much. So… what happened here? The new interface on the iPhone (and ipad) seems to be a total downgrade, with a lot of features I would often use hidden behind new menus. Okay, whatever, I can get used to that. Then the subtitle download button seems more difficult to access on the iPad, which is bizarre. Still, not gamebreaking. Two super annoying problems, which is why I’m rating this app so low after loving it so long- 1) now the app creates a dummy “put your media files here” in the folder, which you cannot delete- or rather, you can delete it, but the app will restore it on startup. I do not need to be reminded where my files go. Please stop reminding me, I’m not 80 years old. Secondly, the video filters, playback speed and sleep timer options on the iPhone just… don’t work? At all? I’ve tried restarting the app, restarting my phone, downloading the app again, no dice. I don’t often review app, but when I do, it’s because the developers released a worse version of a good app without proper testing. One last thing- I would’ve just submitted a bug report but there’s no option for that? Fair enough, here’s a negative review instead…

It’s great and I’ve used it for a few years, but it seems like every time I update VLC some songs that are in playlists are removed. They’re not deleted, but I have to add them back to playlists. Finally deleted all of VLC, did a clean install and all that. Hopefully solves the problem. Although here’s the solution: Let us be able to just add a folder of songs to a playlist. This is an iPhone, so I use iTunes to drag and drop all my music folders over to VLC. It would be awesome if there was a new tab under ‘audio’ or maybe ‘playlists’ that are for folders. Until then this’ll stay at four stars, but I would love to bump it up to five. Keep up the good work. Also if we could sort the songs in a playlist like we can sort our total songs, that would be great.

This sounds stupid, I know. It opened automatically the first time I played a song, but half a second after it closed the now playing viewer and now always starts songs in the small bar at the bottom (like a quick controls you know? With the skip songs and pause and play?) and nothing I do opens the now playing menu. iPad if Apple doesn’t show you. I can’t use repeat, or song speed, or anything but skip and play/pause without the now playing menu. I have tried all sorts of gestures near the small bar. All swiping down does is close it and left and right skips songs. I cannot open that now playing menu! Help, please. I love your app but I just can’t open this menu now.

I tried to upload a movie(.ts file) along with a subtitle file (.SRT) via iTunes file sharing onto VLC on my iPad , and while the movie was playable the subtitles wouldn’t load at all. If i did attempt to load any subs, the movie would stop playing and the screen would turn black. After this the only way to make the video play again was to delete the subtitle file for some reason. I have the desktop version of VLC player where the subtitle and video file have to be named the same thing and placed in the same folder for it to work, so I tried that method with VLC for IPad but it still doesn’t work. I have also tried to change the subtitle encoding option to the “universal” types (UTF) and the subs still wouldn’t load. The other options for uploading or downloading subs don’t work either. It’s frustrating because it’s a simple feature and yet it doesn’t work.

Pros: I just wanted an app that loops my music, and I loved that it has that option and also has the sleep timer because that’s exactly what I was using this for. Problem: I fail to have any success with “login to cloud” or whatever it is where it says it can import files from a cloud server. I have some music files on icoud and all it does is act like I have to select individual files but when I do this it takes forever and acts as if downloading then fails. I tried to logon to google drive because I had some audio files there too, and it doesn’t even load a screen to login. I tried to share files to VLC from my cloud and it won’t allow me to save the files in VLC or even add them to a playlist; so I can only listen to one file at a time. Very annoying. If someone can help, I will gladly update this. For reference, using iOS on iPhone X

Audio playback UI is ruined in this version. There no longer is double-tap anywhere on screen to fast forward/rewind, instead I have to use the dedicated buttons which means slower use speed. Also the entire app lags now, whereas before it didn’t. If I tap the skip buttons too fast, it lags and then crashes the app. Terrible update for listening to podcasts. Update: it’s been a week and I can no longer continue fighting with my sound files. Seeking is ruined, the seek bar lags badly and is unresponsive when trying to find my previous position in the podcast (the app no longer resumes same position on audio files). The ff/rw buttons are equally unresponsive and laggy, whereas before the update they were quick and immediately responsive. This is the 3rd of updates that made the UI worse and worsened performance. I have no choice but to leave VLC and find another app. iPhone 12 Pro iOS 16.1.1

I have a modest but growing CD collection, and I was overjoyed to find that VLC, which I've been using on windows for years, had a mobile version. I ripped all of my albums to FLAC files and dumped them on my phone. After spending a few minutes happily listening to music which I never expected to become portable for me, I realized that there was a noticeable stutter, almost like a scratched CD skipping, every few minutes on most tracks. Because it happened in the same place every time, I assumed that the files had been corrupted in the transfer (many of the CDs I ripped had been basically unused until the rip, so I ruled out the possibility of damaged CDs). Nope. I checked the files using VLC on my pc. Same exact timestamp on every song I tested had the same stutter. Ok, so the files hadn't ripped correctly. To double check, I opened a couple files in windows media player. No stutter. I googled the issue, and apparently it's a bug in the VLC software that's been around for more than FOUR MONTHS?? My files are totally fine, but my main player on both PC and now mobile can't play them correctly. I like the app, I like the UX, but I cannot recommend this app without the ability to correctly play such a common file type. Come on guys, this app is an easy 5 once this bug gets fixed.

It's also what I use to view webm/ogg files. A game changer if you have a huge library and want to save on space! Unfortunately I couldn't give it 5 stars in its current state. The UX is a bit.. avant-garde. Sometimes i try to swipe down / pinch to zoom (for video) and it turns the volume/brightness down or changes aspect ratio. Great for power users but it trips me up most of the time. And most recently im having an issue with the repeat 1 mode (🔂). Playing a song all the way through in the background will cause the loop to break, and stop playing the song. Hoping since the app is open source that'll get addressed soon tho! :)

I used this app for a long time to view webm files that I couldn’t view normally on my iPhone. Now that iPhone browsers can play webm files, I use this as an archive tool so that I have videos that I love. However: a video I tried to play in the app has made it so I can no longer open the app. If I try to open the app, (after unlocking) it immediately crashes. I loved this app and that if I wanted to I could listen to FLAC’s and archive media. I don’t want to delete the app because I’m worried I’ll lose the media I’ve accumulated. I feel like a possible solution would be to have a setting available in the settings app that can be enabled that only lists the media added to the app. Then from the app, being able to delete files from the name. I’ve posted a similar review before and I do not enjoy leaving a negative review on an app that I like, but I don’t know how to contact the developers otherwise.

App gets constant updates for bug fixes, but often times previously fixed bugs just keep coming back. Sometimes new bugs appear as well. Bugs - shuffle sometimes still repeat to first selected song after about 5 songs. - flac files sometimes do not play when selected, even when it is shown to be playing (requires restart) - shuffle state doesn’t save after app is closed. sometimes works sometimes doesn’t - now when shuffle is selected, selecting the song you want to play just shuffles to another one. So you would have to turn off shuffle, select your song then hit shuffle again. Suggestions - add option to turn off changing album cover of selected song to an equalizer. - add option to sort songs numerically, where we can change the position of the songs - add more settings for customization - give users the ability to turn off a new feature or animation. e.g. new bump animation is added to a selected song, give us the option to turn that off Still, the dev has made a lot of quality UI changes and bug fixes which makes this one of the best looking audio players on ios.

This application is not even a work in progress. If you install and open the app it gives vague instructions for loading video content present on your machine into the App Library. (You have to do that because the app has no navigation capability to point it to your video file.) Guess what? The instructions refer to buttons and controls that don’t exist. If you do manage to get something into the app and want to make use of it good luck. It does not have a standard AirPlay interface. It might connect to your AirPlay display device but you will only get audio and no video. There is no troubleshooting info anyplace to fix, if that is even possible. If you use the app to play a video locally the controls are extremely difficult to make active during playback. You can poke and prod like a madman for hours and the app does not respond. No, this app is nothing but an immense headache.

I love VLC so much. I threw my WAV files and a few MP4 files on it and it does what I need… but it doesn’t report song information to either my Dock Connector to my truck or to my iPhone’s lock screen. Maybe fix this issue? I even tried reinstalling the app, and even force rescanned the Media Library. I also think a “Lyrics” function should be added where if you have files, you can edit them on iTunes or some other related app before dropping them in VLC, and if they’re written to that file, VLC detects it and adds a button for you to view the lyrics on the current audio player page. Otherwise, this app is perfect! Opens almost anything.

Listen, I just want to use this to play audio files. Adding songs to the app is really easy (you can just put it in the VLC folder), and I give this app props for that, but unfortunately, the app doesn’t function once it’s actually running. For some reason, it is incapable of playing audio files correctly. Audio is always incredibly sharp, typically around a half step above where it should actually be, though sometimes even more. For those who don’t know what that means, essentially the app is playing higher sounds than it’s supposed to and it’s really annoying. Other than that, certain audio files will make really loud snapping noises occasionally while playing. Again, this is unacceptable for a music player. Lastly, I’ve had a lot of difficulties with the UI. Controlling volume and brightness by sliding on the right and left sides of the screen makes it REALLY easy to accidentally adjust the volume or change the brightness. This means you could be listening to something and accidentally set the volume to max, killing your eardrums. It’s really upsetting how unusable this app is. If these issues get fixed, I will promptly adjust my review, as this app has tons of potential.

This app has been amazing and i have used it for years but recently with the new update iam having alot of issues ,for one my shows play in a green tint all the time and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it , another problem is that my audio files are not playing in the full screen just showing up as a bar on the lower part of the screen iam unable to press on them and have them displayed on the full screen where i can edit the playback speed and everything. Please fix the bugs soon ,this app is a staple and iam sad to see it having so many issues. 4 stars for always being reliable before this problem.

First big Thanks to VLC developers for everything This 3.5.0 came with many features but have same issues : - Full screen ( Crop to Fill ) video can not fill all of screen of iPhone 15 pro should rotate portrait and back rotate again to landscape to be fix - when add voice to Video than forward the clip the UI of Video player will hang - music player part when playing song the screen is awake all the time and that reduce battery life - music player have not history if close the app and come back to app can’t see the song playing history to continue - wish can swipe songs by gesture and have an option to stop playing video while app is in background.

VLC player is choppy when playing back H265 content or high bit rate H264. Even if I download from server to local inside of VLC, the playback is choppy with hardware decoding. Disabling hardware acceleration helps, but doesn’t fully eliminate choppiness, of course it will then eat through battery using software decoding though, so not useable. Another program I use on this same iPhone for streaming from DLNA media doesn’t have same choppiness issues, but it does use the built in iOS 17 video controls when playing videos instead of VLC’s custom player (which I really like aside from the choppiness). Unfortunately it’s gotten to the point that I may just have to switch over to another media player as hardware decoding has gotten worse over time with VLC.

I’ve been using this for the past few months and it works great. It plays my music fine, and importing music was a breeze. It can also be used as a pseudo file transfer app, letting me export files to other devices. However, I have some problems. One, I notice that my music skips somewhat when turning on my phone. Music scrubbing outside of the app (on the lock screen) is very inaccurate, and will sometimes jump to another part of the song. After skipping, the pitch is slightly off; it’s slightly higher. I know it’s a very niche nitpick, but since I’ve noticed it I can’t un-hear it.

I’ve looked up my issue and apparently the audio not starting when you play somethIng on this app for the first second or so that the audio should be there (or after pausing it and then starting it back up) is supposed to be fixed in vlc 4.0, but since that version doesn’t seem to exist for iPad (even in another app, like a vlc beta app) I guess I need to find another player that can do both music and video properly? When this problem is fixed I’ll definitely come back to VLC as it’s the best player I've found by far. But I can't really overlook the audio (delay? I’m unsure what exactly to refer to it as.) issue anymore. I’ve appreciated this app for several years (both on my laptops and on my iPad) and am sad that this happened.

I am using this app to watch simple MP4 files. It works excellent for watching them while on my iPad however, while I am casting to my TV with Chromecast, it works for a while, and then will give playback errors. When I attempt to use airplay, the video will not work at all. Sometimes they told me it has to convert the video and I say OK while other times it doesn’t, but it’s still gives errorsafter casting for an undefined amount of time to the TV. The worst part is the video completely restart each time and you have to go through the video and find the part you were on.

I use the app to play downloaded mp3 podcasts, and the interface is very user friendly. The equalizer options are also great. However, the app crashes frequently and does not “save” the time the podcast was at. Given that some of the episodes may be 4+ hours long, trying to find the time the episode left off is difficult. Furthermore, if the player is paused, the app will crash resulting in the same issue described above. Additionally, the skip buttons are in 60 second increments, so shorter/customizable options would be great. I use VLC on desktop, and the app works flawlessly - for mobile there are a few areas that could be a bit better!

I loved the previous VLC Media Player and used it extensively on my iPad. After this recent update, I will be looking for something else. I can no longer use my iPad keyboard space bar to pause a video anywhere in the video. I often paused videos during the credits so I can see by the credits showing in the thumbnails which videos I’ve watched. That doesn’t work anymore. Also now when I load a bunch of videos that are named in alphabetical order and are loaded in that order, when I start the first one playing, after it’s done, the next one that plays may or may not be the next one in line. I’m not sure what this is app is doing but it has gone downhill in one update.

[updated] Colorspace issue fixed in 3.3.2. Some feedback on the new UI: - [iPad Pro] less sensitive adjustment sliders in playback view?: The left & right side “virtual” sliders for volume & brightness during playback are extremely sensitive, you have to barely roll your finger on the spot for a small adjustment, any bigger finger movement will max out the slider in either direction - [iPad Pro] denser list view?: Non-thumbnail list view (ex.: network folder) leaves a lot of space between names, as well as ~2/3 of the screen on the right empty. Or maybe at least generate & cache thumbnails for non-local folders? [previously] My full review incl. the green/purple video issue and an immediate workaround was not published for 7(!) days - until after the app was updated already. When I wanted this unpublished review removed it WAS published in its useless form below, with a wasted response from the developer? [was: “Review not being published?”-“So delete this because I can’t”]

It was an awesome way for my audio library to be accessible. However, sense the new update, I was having trouble with loop single. You used to be able to skip forward to reply the audio when it was on loop single. But now, when I skip forward (or back) it plays the next or last audio file and it changes loop to loop all. This is so annoying and please make sure we can turn this new feature on or off so I can use the app well again and other people can still take advantage. Thanks!

I have used VLC on my computer for years & love it, hence the higher score. Can not use the app. The app instructions to transfer videos & music from a MacBook to an iPhone do not actually work. It says to use iTunes- I am using macOS Catalina. There is still the iTunes Store but no iTunes App. Now it is music or videos. Maybe if I could transfer from the VLC computer program itself or have new instructions/ videos to help. Edit: was able to get the video on using a flash drive with USB-C & Apple Lightning sides. Works great! Thank you 🙏

A while back my phone was going through some issues and for some reason VLC had reset and all of my music failed to be detected, after rescanning my media library I was shocked to find that all of my playlists which I organized quite carefully had also been reset. A way to backup playlists would be absolutely amazing, perhaps an ini file that can be backed up and placed elsewhere in case the media library fails to be detected? I really love this app and this is the one thing that keeps it from greatness

I’ve had it installed for several months but didn’t use it very often at first and it worked just fine in that time. As I started to use it more though it started bugging out every time. It will no longer continue playing when I lock my phone, once it finishes a song it stops playing. Even when my phone isn’t locked it’ll stop playing at random and once it does, the only way to get it to work again is to close and reopen. Sometimes when launching it with just refuse to play audio until you open and close it a few times. I use vlc on my pc and I love it there, but this app version is absolutely terrible to use and frustrates me more than anything else.

There was an issue before the latest update which was whenever I turned on the “Descending order” toggle under “Sort by” option, it used to automatically turn the toggle off when I switched tabs or closed the app and relaunched it. In the latest update, it seems that the issue is only partially fixed. Now it doesn’t automatically turn the toggle off when I switch tabs but it still automatically turns it off if I completely close the app (from app switcher) and enter it again. Please fix this too.

For some reason my videos were still taking up space even after being deleted from the app. And it was showing up in my iPhones System Data taking up the entirety of my space because I had a lot of stuff in the app. Had to do a full restore and thankfully had enough space on my computer for a basic backup to get my space back and all my other stuff. Will not being using it again till I hear of a fix or otherwise. The app used to work fine, I have no idea what has happened to it but I may need to restore my iPad as well because I had some files there too from a while back that may still be lingering on it’s already limited storage.

First I really appreciate the team of people that made and published VLC for free. Extremely generous and kind! However, the media file organization is offensively bad. It's just so bad, what were you thinking? In the Files app I have my media organized into folders. VLC ignores all that, and gives me two inferior options instead: all files dumped together, or VLC's own auto grouping feature which is awful and seems to work on matching the first five characters of the filename. Is it really so hard to present the files in the same folder structure that is shown in the Files app? Well it wouldn't be in the spirit of free software if it didn't have some glaring usability issue. Other than that pretty serious issue, VLC plays a wide variety of formats, seems to sync up audio and video correctly, lets me choose audio and subtitle tracks, displays subtitles well, and doesn't cause my iPhone to overheat. So great job there! If you make the media browser not bad I will pay money for this app.

Every now and then the app will get stuck in an infinite loop of about 30 seconds when live streaming. The only way to fix this is to close the app, turn off the iPhone or iPad, wait a few minutes, and then start over with a cold boot. Is this an Apple problem or VLC problem? It started happening about a month ago when Apple pushed out their latest iOS and iPadOS. Perhaps Apple should worry less about “new features” for the fully failed but woke loser snowflake generation and spend more time on fixing existing problems.

Album is initially sorted wrong. When I hit play, it automatically sports itself into the proper order. But the play list has already been set with the incorrect initial order. When playing a song, the first few milliseconds are cut off sometimes. When hitting pause sometimes it continues playing for a few hundred milliseconds before pausing. When editing playlists, things are getting randomly selected for no reason and half the time can’t get unselected. Can’t search for folder name. Sometimes albums are in named folders but don’t have the right meta data. Folder name displays but can’t be searched for. Conversely, many individual files that are in one folder but have meta data from different artists are all split up into dozens of icons with just a single sing in them, causing a bunch of scrolling for no reason. Folder icons are too big and annoying to scroll through. Too many various other interface usability issues to discuss.

I really like this app since I’m stuck in 2008 and prefer to have my own personal copies of audio files downloaded to my devices. It’s fairly customizable, does a decent job of automatically sorting artist/album, works with pretty much any file type. Only a few issues: 1. Sometimes when listening via Bluetooth, audio tracks have about the first second cut off, or a noticeable gap between tracks. 2. I’d love if I could download full folders from an smb file share, since that’s typically how I get my music to my phone- having to go to Apple’s awful Files app to do so is annoying, but slightly better than copying tracks individually. 3. The ability to modify the tags used to organize tracks straight from the app would be great for the few cases where it doesn’t sort like I want it to.

I've been experimenting with using VLC as a music player on my iPad, and it has mostly worked. But even when you change the viewing setting from "Grid" to "List" it still shows them in a horizontal grid. Even worse this makes it impossible to rearrange songs on a playlist or the up-next list unless you open VLC in a narrow floating window, which forces them into an actual vertical list. And it's still annoying that you block pip. Why would you do that? Pip is a really useful feature, you're just making your product worse by doing that.

The 3.5.0 update fixed a lot of the problems I had with the app, but it missed something that I wanted. Something that the desktop version has that the mobile version doesn’t. I want to see convert/save in mobile. That is a much needed feature for someone who listens to several codecs of music in their library. If we were able to convert .ogg to .mp3 on mobile the floodgates would be opened to so many great things. Also, can there be a feature to change metadata in VLC? Does anyone else notice that the audio wows when you start to play a song? This is a bug.

I use this app to listen to audiobooks and occasionally watch downloaded shows. It usually works fine, but my main issue with it is that I can’t close media and come back to it without it restarting, which is very annoying when I’m listening to long audiobooks and I have to scrub through it just to get back to where I was. I’ve tried using the bookmark feature, but tapping add bookmark does nothing. Edit bookmarks makes it look like I can add a bookmark, but nothing happens when I tap on the add bookmark button. Please fix this issue, and I’ll rate this app much higher.

I use VLC all the time on my PC, but U got this at ChatGPTs recommendation because it’s supposed to also work on my Apple Watch. It clearly does not. Furthermore, I put videos and music on the cloud so that I can play my own content without the internet, by way of uploading from the computer, and then downloading to my phone. Fair enough. But most of the time, I have to “open in” VLC twice. The first time doesn’t do anything, while if I open a music file in Flacbox, for example, it works every single time. It’s frustrating, and I’ll keep looking for something better until/unless these quirks are resolved.

The app has been very useful for me, as someone who listens to a lot of indie music. However, the audio playback seems to have a persisting bug where it will randomly speed up or slow down. It’s not necessarily a detrimental issue, but it does definitely hinder the listening experience a decent amount. Not sure if there’s something I need to fix on my end or if it’s just the app itself. I have a hard time imagining it’s on my end though, as these songs work fine on everything else I have them on. Hope it gets fixed/there is a fix I can do.

Swipe-to-skip on an imported audio file often crashes playback, or causes it to skip to a random position much earlier in the track, or causes it to skip to another track. Also, when these things happen, the track time gets distorted (ie a 1.5 hour track shows up as 38 minutes) and the display is confused about the current position. Similar confusion while manually scrubbing. Idr if this is a problem with short tracks, but it’s definitely a problem with long tracks. // Old review: When selecting multiple videos, the UI buttons at the bottom overlap & some buttons are inaccessible (ie delete button). Attempting to delete multiple videos this way opens menus instead, with no way to go back to content. Happens frequently. Force-quitting the app & relaunching restores the functionality of the delete button temporarily. Pinch video to minimize (to access playlist etc). This change is good, fewer steps.

I don’t know how to explain this seemingly isolated-to-me incident, but dammit I’m going to try; so I have 200+ local files in the local VLC folder, and some tracks after I reached 200 just did not play. No audio at all. Couldn’t pause either. All songs chosen to be affected have Album covers. It’s not an issue with the file, I’m sure of it; It plays normally everywhere else. As far as I’m concerned, this is either 1. A song restriction (no album covers), and/or 2. A HARD 199 SONG LIMIT. Deal killer. I want to like this app, but I just can’t. Get this fixed, and then I can like this media player. Video player not affected.