How to play multiple videos at once on Windows
The fastest way to play multiple videos at once on Windows is a purpose-built multi-video player like Anemone Player, which opens several panels in one window using a pick-a-grid layout. You can also get videos playing side by side with stacked VLC windows or an OBS Studio scene — both work, but neither tool was built for it, and both involve a fair amount of manual setup.
Option 1: Multiple VLC windows
Open VLC, then open a second (and third, and fourth) instance and load a different video into each. It costs nothing and works on any Windows machine. The pain shows up as soon as you want more than two or three videos running:
- —Every window has to be manually resized and dragged into position, and it doesn't remember the arrangement next time.
- —Nothing keeps the windows in sync if one crashes, gets moved, or gets clicked behind another.
- —There's no scheduling — starting, looping, and stopping the whole set has to be done window by window.
- —Swapping in a different set of videos means closing and reopening every instance from scratch.
It's a fine trick for two videos on one screen for five minutes. It stops being fine the moment you need it to look the same way twice.
Option 2: An OBS Studio scene
OBS Studio can technically do this: create a scene, add a Media Source for each video file, then resize and position each one by hand until they fill the canvas. It's a genuinely capable tool — it's just built for streaming and recording a scene out to an audience somewhere else, not for displaying videos to people standing in front of the screen. Bending it to that job means:
- —Positioning every Media Source manually, with no grid presets to snap to.
- —Using the "Fullscreen Projector" trick just to show the scene on the actual monitor, since OBS's own window is a preview/editing surface, not a player.
- —No playlist, shuffle, or dedup logic — each Media Source plays whatever file it was pointed at, on loop, until you change it.
- —Any change to the set of videos means going back into scene editing mode, which is disruptive if the display is already live.
Option 3: A purpose-built multi-video player
Anemone Player exists specifically for this — playing multiple videos and images at once, each in its own panel, without treating it as a workaround. You pick a grid layout, drag your sources in, and it remembers the arrangement. There's no cap on how many sources you run, images and video mix freely in the same layout, and a built-in shuffle plays through your whole library before repeating anything.
Step-by-step: play multiple videos with Anemone Player
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1
Download and install Anemone Player
Free download for Windows — no credit card needed to start.
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2
Open the app and start your trial
Register with your email or a Google account to get a license key instantly — 30 days, full features.
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3
Pick a grid layout
Choose from the built-in presets — equal splits, portrait/landscape mixes, wide grids — or build your own.
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4
Drag your videos into the panels
Mix in images too if you want — Anemone treats both as first-class content in the same layout.
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5
Hit Go
All panels start playing at once. Walk away — it keeps running unattended.
Try it yourself, free
30 days free, no credit card required. Get your license key instantly.
Frequently asked questions
Can I play multiple videos at once for free?
Yes. Opening several VLC windows or building an OBS scene both cost nothing but your time. Anemone Player is also free to try for 30 days, and its free tier removes the manual window arranging that VLC and OBS require.
Does Windows have a built-in way to play multiple videos at once?
No. Windows Media Player and the built-in Movies & TV app only play one video at a time. Playing several simultaneously requires a third-party tool such as VLC (one instance per video), OBS Studio, or a dedicated multi-video player.
How many videos can I play at the same time?
There's no fixed limit in Anemone Player — layouts range from a single panel up to dense grids of 20 or more. In practice you're limited by your CPU/GPU decoding headroom, disk read speed, and screen resolution, the same constraints that apply to running several VLC windows at once.
Will the videos play in sync with each other?
No — each panel plays independently, the same as running several separate VLC windows. What a dedicated player removes is the manual setup: one saved layout instead of repositioning windows every time, drag-and-drop sources, and a shuffle that won't repeat a clip until the rest of the pool has played.
What's the difference between using OBS and a dedicated multi-video player?
OBS Studio's job is capturing and streaming a scene to an audience somewhere else — recording software repurposed as a local video wall. A dedicated player like Anemone is built to display multiple videos directly to whoever is standing in front of the screen, with layout presets, drag-and-drop sources, and no streaming setup required.
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