A hidden feature of the well-known VLC video player allows us to zoom video while it's playing. We can select any part of the video and choose among a range of magnifications, to better see the part that is of interest. So, grab your HD videos, and let's zoom in.
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For this guide, we will use a royalty free video from the Finding Footage on Vimeo, which we downloaded using ClipConverter.
How to zoom video playback with VLC
After we open the video file with VLC, with the video either playing or paused, we click on Tools -> Effects and Filters.
On the Adjustments and Effects window that will open, we select the Video Effects tab and the Geometry sub-tab.
Don't worry, there are no geometry-related problems to be solved. We just need to check the Interactive Zoom checkbox.
This will transfer the full video to the upper left corner, picture-in-picture style. A white rectangle sets the selection to be magnified, and the main VLC window shows the zoom video playback.
To increase or decrease the zoom rate, we just need to click on the scale, right beneath the full video preview.
We can also select any part of the video to be magnified, by dragging the selection rectangle.
To hide the preview window, we just click on the VLC Zoom Hide text.
It goes without saying that no matter how high definition the original video is, using VLC for zoom video playback will considerably decrease the image quality. After all, we are selecting a small part of the video image and blowing it up to the full VLC window.
Of course, all these changes are temporary. No change is done to the file, and as soon as we uncheck the Interactive Zoom option, the video will be back to normal.
Did you have any problems with zoom video playback?
If anything in this guide didn't work as described, and you weren't able to activate the zoom video playback on VLC, leave us a comment.
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Zick says
Not working for me.I can't move the rectangle or zoom.
Ger says
not working with me either cant move the zoom box or ajust the magnification
catalin nastasa says
cant zoom with vlc, the magnification window its stuck, i run windows 7 and vlc 2.2.4 the latest
Gorry says
thanks for the tutorial, this is very helpful to me
Pete H says
Excellent article works a treat in win 10. thnx