VLC Player Keyboard Shortcuts — All 125, From the Official Docs

VLC is unusual among desktop applications: most of its hotkeys are bare single letters with no modifier at all. F is fullscreen, M is mute, V cycles subtitle tracks. That comes from VLC's origins as a player you drive from across the room in fullscreen, where reaching for Ctrl is awkward. The practical consequence is that VLC hotkeys fire the moment the player window has focus — there is no text field to accidentally type into — so they are worth learning properly rather than half-remembering three of them.

The seeking keys follow a ladder that is easy to miss if you only ever use the arrow keys. Shift jumps 5 seconds, Alt jumps 10 seconds, Ctrl jumps a full minute, and Ctrl + Alt jumps five minutes — each combined with Left or Right. Once that pattern clicks you can scrub through a two-hour file without touching the timeline. E steps forward one frame, but note it only moves forward; VLC has no documented single-frame reverse.

Subtitle synchronisation is where VLC quietly beats every other player, and almost nobody knows the shortcuts. H and G nudge the subtitle delay in steps. Better, if you can hear a line and see when its caption should appear: press Shift + H at the moment the audio says it, Shift + J at the moment the subtitle should show, then Shift + K to apply the difference automatically. Ctrl + Shift + K resets it if you overshoot.

The cropping keys are the other hidden system. Alt + R, Alt + D, Alt + C and Alt + F shave one pixel from the top, left, bottom and right respectively; adding Shift to any of them puts the pixel back. That is how you kill the black bars on a badly mastered file without opening a single dialog. Bookmarks work the same paired way: Ctrl + F1 through Ctrl + F10 set a playlist bookmark, and the bare F1–F10 keys jump to them.

Every combination on this page is from the official VideoLAN hotkey reference for the Qt interface — the default desktop interface on Windows and Linux. A handful of entries the VideoLAN wiki itself flags as unverified have been left out rather than guessed at. If you use a skinned interface or the macOS build, some keys differ; all of them are rebindable under Ctrl + P → Hotkeys.