Unable to play h.265 Videos VLC crashes

VLC Media Player is one of the best and most famous Video players for PC at present. This is due to VLC is open source, modern, and supports almost all types of video files. VLC even has extra features like basic video converting, recording, etc.

But just like everything VLC also has flaws and these flaws especially occur in-terms of H.265 or HEVC video files. High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) or also known as H.265 is a video compression standard.

HEVC offers better data compression from previous AVC (Advanced Video Coding) by 25% to 50%. This means HEVC files can be 25% to 50% smaller in sizes when compared to the previous AVC files with the same level of quality.

But as this HEVC offers better compression it is also more complex. That’s why it is more difficult to decode, this causes problems when playing an H.265 video. Especially when the file is of higher resolutions like 4K, then VLC crashes.

Fix VLC Media Player crashing while play H.265 Video

You can try fixing HEVC video playing problems just follow the steps below.

1. Open VLC, search in start menu to open it.
2. Then in VLC click on Tools. Then in Tools submenu click on Preferences.
3. Then click on Video, In that set Output to Direct3D11.
4. Then click on Input / Codecs, and select Hardware-accelerated decoding to Direct3D11 Video acceleration.
5. Click on Save, Now try playing H.265 Video in VLC, it should work without any crashes.

If you are not getting Direct3D11 then try updating VLC to the latest version and then follow the steps above.

What if this doesn’t fix the problem?

This might not always fix the VLC crash while playing the HEVC file, especially with 4K video files. In that case, you should try installing KM Player or any other video player that supports HEVC files better. I use the KM player and I have never faced any issue while playing H.265 videos file in KMP. If you want you can download KMPlayer from here

You can also use VLC media player to convert video files into smaller sizes here is how to fix it.