If VLC refuses to hide the mouse cursor when you play a movie


You may face this strange problem when you play a movie in VLC media player. Usually the mouse cursor disappears when you start your movie, but now stays there no matter what you do.

First of all make sure your settings are right. Go to Tools > Preferences, Click at the bottom side of the panel the Show All radio button, then go to the Video category in the left list. Find the option to Hide cursor and fullscreen controller after x milliseconds and define a timeout (I use “1000”).

If VLC suddenly stopped hiding the cursor, watch your other open programs, whatever you have running along with VLC. The mouse cursor may not disappear if uTorrent or the Task Manager is running, and/or Winamp is playing.

Do not try to reinstall VLC or even close uTorrent. Just right click on uTorrent’s icon at the system tray and select the “hide” option. When uTorrent is minimized to the system tray (not just to the taskbar), the mouse cursor as always disappears from VLC. If Winamp is playing, you may have also to stop Winamp (no need to minimize or hide it to the system tray). Experiment with other open programs that may interfere and cause this cursor problem to VLC.

If your problem persists, check another solution that helped a visitor of this site, shove the mouse cursor into a top corner, and it’s out of vlc’s sight. The cursor is supposed to disappear automatically, but if nothing else works, you can use this as a final resort.

* Check this list with the best free video converters, or video cutters and joiners

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

5 Responses

  1. Gurunath M says:

    This was amazing, nailed the problem. I don’t know how you knew my utorrent was running, but it was what was causing the mouse not to disappear… This was a great help… Keep it up…

  2. Carlos says:

    uTorrent was my issue as well. Thanks for this thread!

  3. Jimmy says:

    awesome.. thanks for the post.. utorrent was my issue too !!!

  4. bc says:

    In VLC 2.1 on win 7, if the task manager is running, that will cause the mouse to not auto hide.

  5. Nikmurder says:

    thank you! was trying to kill everything until your comment! it actually was the task manager!