Running Ubuntu 22.04:

I’ve tried searching for a solution to this, but there’s way too many false positives. I know you can enable/disable using a single instance in two places, but that’s not my issue. If I open a video the first time, VLC works fine. If I have both the “only use one instance” off, I can click on other videos and they run too. But if I have any combination of those boxes checked I can only play the first video, and to play a new video I have to manually close the VLC player.

What I want to happen is to have one player spawn, but any new video will run in that player, overriding the existing video. Is that just not possible? I don’t want to have to close the window every time I run something new, and I don’t want to have to go back and lose a whole bunch of separate VLC instances when I’m done.

Update: I found the solution, and I should have tried it first before posting. Oh well, at least I didn’t leave anyone who might find this hanging like a DenverCoder9.

Being Ubuntu, VLC was installed via Snap (I can’t recall if I did it or it’s default). I suppose I should look into the de-Snap process I’ve seen mentioned before, as I’ve also had a few non-crash errors since running Ubuntu where snap was the source.

So the solution was to install the Debian version in terminal, not Snap. It works like I expect and wanted, and I can run video after video and it uses the same window.