Skip to content
Marcel Bootsman

Fix VLC Player deinterlacing not working

Published: January 27th, 2023 | Updated: July 22nd, 2023 Ubuntu Screenshot of Big Buck Bunny playing in VLC Player

I’m using VLC player since ages. First on Windows, which I have not been using since 2009. Since then I’ve been running Ubuntu. For some reason I did not see that deinterlacing was nog working correctly.

When watching videos with VLC player, they played interlaced, and I noticed a few days back that they were. So, I tried MPlayer and saw that the videos were playing deinterlaced.

What I tried

I’ve tried a few things to solve the issue:

  • Reinstall VLC Player with apt

  • Reinstall VLC Player with snap

  • Changed the deinterlace settings in VLC Player

Nothing solved the issue of videos not playing deinterlaced.

The solution

After DDG-ing (that’s DuckDuckGo-ing) with various search keywords, I kind of gave up, and switched to MPlayer. But since I don’t like to give up, I started looking at different settings in VLC Player and came across the Hardware-accelerated decoding in Tools -> Preferences -> Input/Codecs. After I disabled that, I restarted VLC Player, and the issue was gone.

VLC Player settings to disable hardware accelerated decoding.
VLC Player settings to disable hardware accelerated decoding

About Marcel Bootsman

Marcel discovered the web in 1995. Since then he has paid attention to and worked with lots of technologies and founded his own WordPress oriented business nostromo.nl in 2009.

Currently Marcel is Business Development Manager Dutch & DACH Markets at Kinsta where he helps Kinsta's client base grow with Managed WordPress, Application, Database and Static site hosting.

You can contact Marcel on a diverse range of online platforms. Please see the Connect section on the homepage for the details.