The first time this ran it took for freakin’ ages!

This should take less than a few minutes

What the hell is that supposed to mean? Less than a few? 73 minutes perhaps?

Rant over.

If you’ve ever installed VLC and been greeted by the “Building font cache” message on first launch, you know the frustration. VLC scans all the fonts on your system to build a cache for subtitle rendering, and on machines with hundreds of fonts installed this can take an unreasonably long time.

The vague progress message doesn’t help either — “this should take less than a few minutes” is not exactly reassuring when you’re staring at it for over an hour. The good news is it only happens once (or after a VLC update). If you’re really impatient, reducing the number of fonts installed on your system speeds it up considerably.