The VLC media player is one of the best and most popular software to play music and videos on a computer and smartphone. Just like people know GarageBand for music mixing and composition, VLC made its name as a primary choice for media players. Thanks to the long list of audio/video formats it supports. While VLC has been in the market for quite a few years now, the software still gets regular updates for bug fixing and advanced features.
In this article, we are discussing a common error that is displayed on your screen as a dialog box “building font cache” in VLC media player. This error generally shows up while you open VLC or sometimes in the middle of playing a video or a movie.
“Building font cache” appears whenever there is a mismatch or the software is unable to process the subtitles because of its language or the type of font as told by a VLC developer. VLC needs to update its database to make the software compatible with various subtitle fonts.
Whenever we add subtitles to a movie/video VLC automatically renders the whole text in advance and places it over the video. But sometimes when the .SRT file is corrupt or there is a bug in the software the “building font cache” error appears.
Enough of the technicalities, let’s look at the solution to this error. This solution will help you get rid of the dialog box which keeps appearing again and again.
NOTE: The above steps can be carried out on both Windows and Mac PC’s. The VLC media player has the almost same set of frameworks for both.
Step1- Open VLC media player and click on preferences under the tools tab as shown below.
Step2- Click on ALL button in the show setting box at the bottom of the window which will show you all settings in the left pane.
Step3- Select Subtitles/OSD from the list.
Step4- A window will appear showing subtitle settings. Now change the text rendering module settings from automatic to Dummy font renderer as shown below and save it.
This will make the font rendering mechanism stop and the “building font cache” error will not be shown repeatedly.
One thing to keep in mind while doing this procedure is if you stop font rendering before the software has read the subtitle at least once, then your subtitle will be removed. So, if you want your subtitles then just wait for 2-3 minutes until the file is loaded and then carry out the above procedure so that you can watch your movie/video uninterrupted.
Another way of getting rid of this problem is to turn off the Auto-detect subtitles option. This option is available below the text module setting which we discussed in Step 4. But this will disallow VLC to automatically scan for .SRT files in your video folder.
Even after doing all these steps the error is repeatedly appearing then you can also try some other media player available on the internet. For example, you can use KM Player or PotPlayer which has been the second favorite of many VLC users when they are hit by such problems in VLC.
I hope this article has addressed the issue you are facing. If you have any more doubts regarding the VLC media player please comment down below and we will try to provide you the best solution with the help of our articles as soon as possible.
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