How to automatically resize VLC player for vertical videos

Videos have always been recorded in landscape mode. They used be square a long, long time ago but once the era of square monitors disappeared, videos became landscape oriented. Then phones got cameras, and those cameras became insanely good and now, we have vertical videos. Vertical videos were shunned, and then apps like Snapchat and Instagram gave them a real home, so they’re never going away. Here’s how you can automatically resize VLC player for vertical videos if you’re playing them on your desktop.

Resize VLC player for vertical videos

Open VLC player and go to Tools>Preferences from the menu bar, or just tap Ctrl+P to open the app’s preferences.

On the preferences window, go to the Interface tab, and look for an option called ‘Resize interface to video size’. Enable it, and click the Save button at the bottom.

Next, close and then run VLC player again. Play a vertical video and the player will automatically resize to fit it. This means there will be no black bars on either sides, or at the top or bottom of the video. The window will fit snugly around the video frame.

This setting will apply to all videos, and not just to vertical ones. What that means is, any video you play in VLC player will force the app’s window to resize to fit it exactly. The option to resize the window according to the video’s size cannot be applied to just a single type of video.

We should mention that this feature is a bit buggy. It’s been around for over three years but it has been buggy for just as long. Sometimes, VLC player doesn’t resize according to the video size. Other times, it fails to detect the size of a video and just runs in the incorrect size. This might have to do with certain information being absent in the video file.

If VLC player is consistently failing to resize itself correctly for a certain video, but is working just fine for all others, it most likely means that there is a problem with the video. You can always resize the player manually.

Vertical videos are popular on the mobile platform and not so much on the desktop. You will find these videos on Facebook and Twitter but those websites can play the videos just fine and you don’t need a video player that is optimized for vertical videos on your desktop. Let’s hope that never changes.