I have suddenly grown to quite like Democracy Player since I’ve started to really get into YouTube. I can subscribe to YouTube channels and it downloads the latest ones, oh and video casts and stuff. It has a nice channel guide too. It plays almost anything as on Windows it has VLC in the backend.

Problem in Vista though? VLC’s default settings don’t work for everyone. It appears ATi cards support the default Direct3D mode, and nVidia supports OpenGL, the non-default. Democracy Player won’t let you change rendering modes, and picking them from your own VLC setup doesn’t help. If you start a video, Vista will fall back into Aero Basic.

But, now they do! I worked late in the night to get it working properly, and I came with a solution. First, get the 0.9.6 RC0 release, then, to quote my post on the Democracy forums:

If you have VLC installed, play with the video output until you get it working properly (as in, you can see the video and it doesn’t bust down to Aero basic). Modes that have apparently worked are DirectX, Direct3D and OpenGL (I think OpenGL works on nVidia cards, as I have a 7900GS and it works for me).

Once you have done that, go to Start, and type in “C:\Users\your username\AppData\Roaming\vlc”. You’ll see a “vlcrc” file. Copy that.

Now, go to where you installed Democracy, ie C:\Program Files\Participatory Culture Foundation\Democracy Player. Paste the vlcrc file in there. Start Democracy and run a video.

Only problem I have is in full screen mode it fails to make the controls disappear, the moment they do they return again.

Now, it won’t revert back to Aero basic. As said, the only problem is getting full screen to work properly. I’m not sure what the issue is there, but I’m sure the developers can find something.