multiple instances of VLC when "allow only one instance"

[Wouter de Groot]

Binary package hint: vlc

Opening multiple files by right-clicking in nautilus and selecting "Open with VLC media player" causes several vlc processes to run. There is no one-to-one relationship between files and processes: one process might end up with one file in its playlist, while a second has thirteen. Opening the same set of files the same way twice will not necessarily result in the same amount of processes.

So far I've seen this on groups of mp3, ogg vorbis or AAC files and a group of mixed video formats.

The option "allow only one instance" is active, the D-Bus control interface checkbox is ticked, and dbus-daemon appears to be running.

When VLC is playing and I open one or more files, behavior is as expected.

Ubuntu 8.10 i386
vlc 0.9.4-1ubuntu3

[Pekka Vuorela (pvuorela-iki)]

This is caused by patch introduced in bug #275043. Vanilla VLC .desktop file has "Exec=vlc %U" which passes URLs as parameters, patched version "Exec=vlc %f" which passes only one file. The 'Allow only one instance' option doesn't help much because all of them are started at the same time.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

This bug should be fixed by vlc 1.0.0 in karmic. Can you try it and report if this bug is fixed?

You can download all 1.0.0 vlc deb directly from ubuntu repositories right here :

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/v/vlc/

[Rumpeltux (rumpeltux)]

The allow only one instance setting should also be set by default, otherwise any opening of a bunch of video/audio files with vlc from nautilus will result in an absolutely unusable system. And I did not find out about the existance of such a settings until reading this bug report.

[Pekka Vuorela (pvuorela-iki)]

While "allow only one instance" could be a sane default value, the lack of it doesn't result in unusable system provided that the .desktop file is fixed (as it should be in karmic). In that case opening all files in a directory two times will just launch two instances having all the files in their playlists.

[rusivi2 (rusivi2-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for posting this bug.

Does this still happen in Lucid?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

Known problem, not fixed upstream

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Marking this triaged since we have an upstream bug.

[Regular User (dot.ru)]

I still have this problem on ubuntu 12.10 but the fix from comment #1 seems to fix it. VLC version 2.0.4 "Twoflower"

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

This is fixed in VLC 3.0.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

Fixed in 3.0