How to fix the “Please wait while your font cache is rebuilt” message in VLC Player

I use VLC player to play all my movies and series. From time to time I’ve tried to play some video and I got an annoying dialog box displayed immediately after trying to open the video.

The dialog box title says “Building font cache” and the text in the box says “Please wait while your font cache is rebuilt. This should take less than a few minutes.”. The dialog box shows an “infinite” progress bar and the only option given to the user is a “Cancel” button that closes the dialog, but also prevents the video from playing.

This message really makes no sense because I’m nottrying to play a video with subtitles that would require any “font cache”. In any case, what is most annoying is the fact that the dialog box seems to be stuck. It says “less than a few minutes” but in reality I’ve seen it open for over 5 minutes, and could never find the patience to wait enough to see it end, so as far as I know, it never finishes.

There is however a way to prevent this dialog from ever showing up. As shown in the following steps:

1- Open VLC by using the Windows Start menu icon (don’t launch it by opening a video file).

2- Go to Tools -> Preferences

 

3- Go to the bottom left corner of the Preferences window and select the “All” bullet.

 

 

4- Go to the bottom of the list and click on the “Subtitles / OSD” option.

 

 

5- Notice that the “Text rendering module” dropdown menu is by default in “Automatic”. Change it to “Dummy font renderer”.

6- Click on the “Save” button.

7- Close VLC and launch it again. This is to make sure all changes take place.

You are done. Now you can play your videos normally, without the annoying dialog box.