How to prevent VLC player from reverting to the native video size on Mac

VideoLAN (VLC) is a free and open-source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. This software can be downloaded from the following link. Below are some benefits of VLC Media Player. VLC runs on the following platforms; Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, etc, and it is completely free with no spyware, ads, and no user tracking. It can be quite annoying having to constantly change the window dimensions of the VLC player when you are playing several files with different screen resolutions. To resolve this issue, proceed with the steps discussed below.

Here are some related guides that might be of interest to you. How to Set Quicktime or VLC as a default player on macOS, how to record your desktop on macOS, How to take a screenshot on a mac device, and how to Check if homebrew is installed on Mac OS.

Resolving VLC’s Persistent Mac Video Size Issue

VLC auto resizes to fit the screen ignoring aspect ratio. You may have encountered the same problem and tried out different VLC preferences without success. This is relatively very easy to resolve on Windows. Regardless of the video aspect ratio you choose, upon playing a new video, it reverts to the native video size on macOS.

VLC has a lot of options as we will be seeing below. Except you are familiar with the settings, it can be extremely very difficult to find the option to stop VLC from automatically resizing according to the video resolution. To resolve this issue on a macOS, you will have to follow the steps.
– Click on the VLC media player from the menu and select and select preferences.

This will open the preferences window as shown below. Click on “Show All”.

Prevent VLC player from reverting to the native video size

Furthermore, This will reveal additional preferences. Please navigate to the interfaces node, expand and click on macosx, and
– Uncheck the “Resize interface to the native video size”

However, As you can see below, the “Resize interface to the native video size” has been unchecked. Henceforth, you shouldn’t see video resizing to the “Normal size”.

Note: In addition, Ensure the Lock Aspect Ratio is checked, you may not like the behavior if you decided to uncheck this button. Turning this off makes the window freely resizable and draws black bars on top and bottom. Moreover, But having the feature “Lock Aspect Ratio” checked will prevent VLC player from reverting to the native video size and make the window freely resizable from left to right and vice versa. Nonetheless, If you wish, you may want to use a different media player instead.

Please click on Continue. Consequently, This will ensure that similar contents are opened by Quicktime in the future by default. I prefer using VLC though, so I will be switching this back 🙂

I hope you found this blog post on how to prevent VLC player from reverting to the native video size helpful. Please let me know in the comment session if you have any questions.