Some versions of VLC have this problem: once you enable visualisations it can not be disabled. Yes, there is a radion button in the menu in Audio –> Visualisations which can be set to “Disable” but to no effect – on next start of VLC it displays the visualizations plug-in screen again. Even if you’re playing a video. Which of course is pretty annoying.
So, this is definitely a bug. How can we reset this to the default state and not have VLC display the visualisation plugin on startup?
Pretty easy actually 🙂 Edit this file:
~/.config/vlc/vlcrc
Find these lines (first one is obviously a comment)
# Audio visualizations (string) audio-visual=visual
Change it to
audio-visual=
Voila. Done. You can now restart VLC and the visual effects screen will not pop up anymore. 🙂