The boring stuff you didn’t want to know:įrom what I read/gathered, the cause seems to have something to do with the Mac OS having high latency when accessing Samba-shares (shares from Windows), and the Mac OS doing particularly poorly when it does many small reads from these shares. You should be good to go! If you still get periodic spikes, you can go into the preferences and increase the cache a bit more. Easiest way is to Right-Click the icon on the dock and choose “Quit”, then start it again. If your lag spikes are longer, you can try going even higher. I had lag spikes of up to 4 seconds at a time on the Macbook here, so I set it to 5000ms (5 seconds). This determines how many seconds of video VLC will cache.

Now change this value from the default of 300.

Go to Input Codecs, Access Modules, File.

The screen will then change to look like it does in the picture above.

Next, Click the “All” button in the bottom left.

First, with VLC running, click VLC/Preferences in the top menu bar.

Sound like the issue you’re having? Here’s the fix… Of course it doesn’t help if Quicktime won’t play your video and VLC will. You may also find that Quicktime DOESN’T stutter or freeze. Basically your video’s happily playing along, and the screen will freeze for 2 or 4 seconds, then play again. If you’re using VLC for Mac OS X and playing files over the network, you might be noticing some stutter, lag, delay, freezing, etc every so often. Update: This is for VLC 1.x – if you’re using the newer VLC 2.x see the updated post at

Vlc for m1