How to stop building font cache in VLC Player while playing video files
If you are a movie or anime enthusiast, you’ve probably encountered the message saying “Building font cache” on VLC Player while playing an MKV or MP4 video. Then you see a progress bar that seems to get suck in 0% or 1%. While the pop up says “Please wait while your font cache is rebuilt. This should take less than a minute”, if you have a basic PC or laptop, the rebuilding process can take more than five minutes and in rare cases the VLC player itself will stop responding and you have to force close it. It can be very irritating when you have to unnecessarily wait for VLC to start playing your video files. The good thing is you can easily fix this irritating video playback delay by simple changing a settings option on VLC media Player.
How to stop building font cache in VLC Player on a Windows PC
- Open VLC Player
- Go to Tools >> Preferences
- On the bottom left, you will see “Show Settings” >> select “All”
- Now, go to Video >> Subtitles/OSD
- On the right, you will see “Text Rendering Module”
- Select “Dummy font renderer” from the drop down menu
After completing above steps, the “building font cache” dialogue message will stop displaying while playing video files. In case your VLC Player hangs up during the cache building process, you may have to delete the temporary app data. To fix this issue:
- Press windows key + r (to bring up “run” box)
- or simply press windows key and type “run” in windows search
- Type %appdata%
- Find the VLC folder and delete it
After deleting the VLC app data folder, VLC will build font cache from scratch and won’t freeze up this time.
To conclude, always make sure your VLC player is up to date. For this, open VLC Player >> go to “Help” >> Select “Check for Updates”. The latest version of VLC has cleared many bugs and improved video performance for different file formats inclyding .mkv. .mov, .mp4, .dat and .mpeg.