Metadata from various artists and music websites is a gigantic inconsistent mess and much harder to edit than filenames. To actually know which file is currently playing, I would like to see it in the "Title" column in VLC. But there seems to be no option for that.
One suggestion I found was to change settings→all→input/codec→section "advanced"→"Change title according to current media" to either "$F" or "$u" or to just empty the field, but none of those things change anything.
Another suggestion was to delete the contents of /usr/lib/vlc/lua/meta, that also changes nothing.
The best workaround I found so far was to enable the "URI" column, move it directly behind "Title" and make the "Title" column as narrow as possible (22 pixels). That way I still see "Titl" at the top, I get the full path (which can be quite long) instead of just the filename and it still shows the wrong title at the beginning of playback in fullscreen mode.
So how do I tell VLC to ignore metadata? Editing all the files that I might ever play in it is not an option, but pretty much everything else is, even editing the source code and compiling it myself.
I would also accept solutions that completely break all metadata handling, including MP3 preview pictures, because I don't want them anyway, but probably most other people who will find this question in the future would prefer a solution that only changes the displayed title.
1 Answer
Just untick in Tools/Preferences/All/ Playlist untick "Automatically preparse items" save & exit / restart VLC and all titles will now be the filenames as found in folder.
Or you can wipe the metadata from all your videos with either MKV Optimizer 2 for mkv files and MP3tag for .mp4 files.
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