It is quite annoying, especially when you have a large font collection, that VLC rebuilds its cache when you are going to watch a movie. This procedure may need a lot of time, and it cannot be skipped. You cannot even close VLC when it rebuilds its cache! The only way to free yourself from this trap is to open Task Manager and terminate the program.

Unfortunately the developers of VLC have not included in the Preferences any option to disable font cache rebuilding, schedule it on a specific time, manually performing it, etc. — yet there is a way to get rid of it. In the menu of VLC, go to Tools > Preferences and check “All” in the “Show Settings” option. Then in “Video” > “Subtitles/OSD” > “On Screen Display” select the “Dummy font renderer function”, instead of “Default” or anything else. Note that you may not be able to see subtitles after you change this preference. If you don’t use subtitles, you won’t have a problem, or if you just need temporarily to get rid of rebuilding, and reverse to the default settings later.

There is a better solution, if you don’t want to change this setting. I use subtitles all the time and I don’t want to disable them. Go to the VLC folder in your Windows account (normally at C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\vlc) and delete the *.cache-1, *.cache-2,  *.cache-3, etc. files. Then let VLC build the font cache. Normally it won’t ever rebuild it, unless you install new fonts. (Sometimes it might seem that VLC starts rebuilding the font cache, but the relevant window disappears immediately!) Follow this way, and you won’t have problems any more with font cache rebuilding, still enjoying your subtitles.

* Don’t miss VLC Untied, a free program that lets you select one or more files or folders in Windows Explorer and load them to VLC media player instantly using a keyboard shortcut, even removing completely any files that may be already loaded and playing.