Settings Privacy

Settings: Privacy

⋯ → Settings → Privacy (Ctrl+P; the header reads Privacy Settings). What VLC remembers about what you play, what it looks up on the internet, and Last.fm. This is the only page without an Advanced Options bar: every row is listed below. See how the Settings window works.

History

Option	Choices / default	What it does	VLC option
Save recently played items	Toggle. Default: on.	Adds what you play to VLC's history: the recently played items of Home and of the media library, and the playback position of each media. Off: nothing new is recorded, and no new resume point is saved either.	save-recentplay
Remember the playback position	Toggle. Default: on.	Lets VLC continue a media where you left off. It is a shortcut for Continue where you left off on Playback: off sets it to Never; on sets it to Ask, or keeps Always if that was chosen. The two rows always agree.	restore-playback-pos (off = 0)
Never remember items matching	Text field. Default: empty (nothing is left out).	A regular expression, matched without regard to case against each item's address and name. Matching items are not saved in the history, and their position is not kept.	redesign/recentplay-filter (interface setting)
Clear history now	Button Clear.	Asks Clear playback history? (Recently played items will be removed from the media library.), then removes them. The settings above stay as they are. Disabled, with the tooltip Media library unavailable, when VLC runs without its media library.

Examples for Never remember items matching

Pattern	Leaves out
private	Every item whose path or name contains private (any case).
\.webm$	WebM files.
^https?://	Everything played from a website.
D:/Private/	Everything in the folder D:\Private (addresses use /, and a space is written %20).
private|\.webm$	Both of the first two.

The address of a local file is its file:/// URL. An invalid expression is ignored, so everything is recorded as usual.

Network

Option	Choices / default	What it does	VLC option
Fetch titles and cover art from the internet	Toggle. Default: off.	Lets VLC look up titles and cover art of your media on the internet. Off: VLC only uses what is in the files and folders themselves. The same setting is Fetch titles and artwork on Library (From the file only / From the file and the internet).	metadata-network-access
Submit played tracks to last.fm	Toggle. Default: off.	Sends the title of each track you play to your Last.fm profile ("scrobbling"). On adds VLC's audioscrobbler interface to the additional interfaces; off removes it (from the control interfaces too). It starts or stops when the window closes.	extraintf / control
Last.fm username	Text field. Default: empty.	The user name of your Last.fm account.	lastfm-username
Last.fm password	Password field. Default: empty.	The password of your Last.fm account.	lastfm-password
Last.fm submission URL	Text field. Default: post.audioscrobbler.com.	The server the played tracks are sent to. Change it only for another service that speaks the Audioscrobbler protocol.	scrobbler-url

The four Last.fm rows appear only in builds that include the Audioscrobbler module. The three fields stay empty while Submit played tracks to last.fm is off; a field shows its value while you edit it. Changing the account while submitting is on restarts the Last.fm connection with the new values.

Good to know

• Resume points need the history. The position of a media is stored with its history entry in the media library. With Save recently played items off, or with the media library off (Library), no new position is saved, whatever Remember the playback position says.
• Clear history now empties the recently played list; it does not change any setting. To stop recording, turn Save recently played items off.
• The filter works per item when it is added to the play queue: changing it does not remove items already in the history (use Clear history now for those).

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