How can I open VLC multiple times?

Question

In my particular case on a Mac, I would like to dump several parallel Flash video streams. So the question is, how can I run several instances of VLC?

Solution 1

From the Terminal window you can open multiple instances of any application by doing:

% open -n /Applications/SampleApp.app/

In this command SampleApp.app is the application bundle in the /Applications folder (see http://www.mactipsandtricks.com/articles/Wiley_HT_appBundles.lasso for a slightly old intro to what is inside an app bundle).

For VLC do the following:

% open -n /Applications/VLC.app

On OS X, the open command is used to open a file as it would be if you clicked on it via the GUI. You can try it on any file in your system to get a feel for how it works.

By using the -n option you get a new instance of the app even if one is already running. From the man page (i.e. man open at the Terminal) :

 -n  Open a new instance of the application(s) even if one is already running.

Solution 2

On the Mac, running multiple instances of VLC is not supported out of the box. You can follow the workaround given here,

http://wiki.videolan.org/How_to_play_multiple_instances_of_VLC

Comments

[Jerome Lecoq]

A beautiful idea, but this setting does not appear to exist on the Mac version.

[PeterJCLaw]

Have you looked elsewhere in the options? (you may need to enable advanced ones) wiki.videolan.org/Common_Problems#I_only_want_one_VLC_player‌​.21 suggests that it should be there...