VLC blames Windows 11 bug for slow performance, defends open source and calls out Microsoft
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VLC blames a Microsoft Defender bug for 33-second startup delays on Windows 11
VLC can take 33 seconds to start playing an MP3 on some Windows PCs, and VideoLAN, the developers behind the open-source media player, says a Microsoft Defender bug is to blame.
Jonathan Blow, the game designer and programmer behind Braid and The Witness, said he had finally switched from VLC to Microsoft’s Media Player because the former had become painfully slow, then used the moment to declare that “a large sector of open source software is in a truly embarrassing place now.”
VideoLAN couldn’t let this criticism slide and accused Microsoft, saying a Windows 11 Defender update was interfering with VLC’s plugin cache. However, we checked VLC’s bug reports and found several users on Windows 10 and Windows 11 describing the same startup problem.
VLC says Microsoft Defender is behind the 33-second delay
Note that the criticism is for MP3 files and not videos, which is what VLC is typically associated with. I have already sold my soul to streaming services like Spotify, and didn’t have any experience of a delay like this despite using VLC every other day.
But for those of you who use VLC to listen to music and have experienced a 33-second delay, the supposed reason is VLC’s plugin cache.
But why VLC needs a plugin cache in the first place?
This was Blow’s follow-up question to VLC, and it piqued my interest as well, because why does a media player need a cache at all just to play one MP3?
Well, as it turns out, VLC is built almost completely out of plugins, codecs, demuxers, input and output modules are all loaded on demand instead of coded into one binary. All of these are listed in a file named plugins.dat.
The cache exists so it doesn’t have to re-scan the whole plugins folder every time you open a media file. It’s a reasonable design, but becomes a single point of failure when something, Defender or otherwise, gets between VLC and that file.
VLC also includes vlc-cache-gen.exe, which can regenerate the cache, and doing so or reinstalling VLC should fix the problem, according to the organization.
Here’s the thing, though. I went looking through VLC’s public issue tracker instead of taking either side’s word for it, and I found that the picture is a lot less clean.
VLC’s bug report shows this isn’t just a Windows 11 problem
Slow VLC startups on Windows are not new. Forum threads on this complaint go back well over a year. One user on Windows 10 described a 24 second delay that vanished as soon as VLC had been opened once, then came back after the PC sat idle for a while.
On VLC’s tracker, one user said swapping out a Qt plugin didn’t fix anything, but regenerating plugins.dat did. Another Windows 11 user running a Ryzen 9 9800X3D and 32GB of DDR5, hardly a machine that should struggle to open an MP3, said refreshing the cache solved it too. Multiple people confirmed the same workaround on their machines.
The original bug reporter pushed back on regenerating the cache, though. He said plugins.dat already existed on both of his affected machines, and when he swapped in a known-good cache file, the startup delay went away. It’s a meaningfully different failure mode than the missing cache, which is why VLC’s maintainers reopened the issue and kept digging into how the cache and Windows Defender interact.
One VLC developer eventually came to the same conclusion as VideoLAN’s tweet, that the slowdown looks like it’s caused by...