After criticism of a lame player: VLC makers blame Windows

If the VLC player takes over 30 seconds to play a simple MP3 file, you’re in trouble. A user used this to generally criticize open source software. However, the developers do not see the problem with themselves, but with Windows.

Criticism of long loading times

The developer of the puzzle games Braid and The Witness, Jonathan Blow, recently expressed massive criticism of the popular media player VLC. The trigger was a delay of over 30 seconds when opening a simple MP3 audio file in Windows. Blow took the incident as an opportunity to question the quality of open source software in general and announced that he would use Microsoft’s own media player in the future. However, the makers of the VLC player did not accept the accusation of poor quality. They firmly denied blame for the massive delays and instead blamed Windows for the problems. Specifically, an error in Microsoft Defender is said to be blocking the software from running smoothly.

Like the development team at VideoLAN on X explained, Microsoft Defender incorrectly classifies the so-called plugin cache of the player program as a threat. The security software moves the important cache file to quarantine. The lack of the file forces the program to rescan all available extensions for codecs and modules every time it is started, causing long loading times.

Modular architecture

To understand the delay, it’s worth taking a look at the VLC architecture. The project started in 1996 as an academic endeavor by students at the French engineering school École Centrale Paris. Today, the VLC player is one of the most successful open source projects in the world with over six billion downloads. The software has an extremely modular structure. Instead of bundling all functions into one file, the program only loads required components when necessary. The file called plugins.dat acts as a table of contents for the modules. If the directory is blocked by the virus scanner, the system will not collapse, but it will become extremely slow. Users can work around the problem by regenerating the cache or setting the player’s installation folder as an exception in Windows Security.

VLC faster than Microsoft’s media player

Switching to Microsoft Media Player, as implemented by developer Blow, offers the advantage that audio files start immediately without manual intervention in system security. However, the Microsoft software is significantly slower when playing videos and uses more memory. The Microsoft program often fails because of rare file formats that the VLC player plays without any problems.

Ultimately, the incident shows how interdependent system components can influence the user experience. While the VideoLAN developers are demanding a clean technical solution from Microsoft, end users are dependent on makeshift solutions for the time being. Until an official update for Defender, users must accept the waiting time for music files or configure the exception manually.