Worse than even hard-coded subtitles or footage captured by an aisle mounted, cheap handicam in a Vladivostok multiplex, out of sync audio beats all other irritations hands down in its efficacy to ruin a movies’ viewing pleasure.

Admittedly, out of sync audio is often a sure sign that you sourced your filmic pleasure from somewhere far left of legitimate, but there are also many above board, non-pirated reasons why your video and audio may less than harmoniously matched; a poor conversion from NTSC to PAL—the length of an audio track not adjusted for the decrease in framerate per second from 29.97 to 25—one of the more common.

Enter the hands down world’s best free video player to the rescue: VLC.

Those in the know have always known that VLC could adjust the synchronisation of the audio in a video track being played (screenshot below)—there is an offset value in milliseconds for such in the advanced audio preferences of the application—but doing so has often been a painful process of trial and error—guess an approximate value, restart the movie, see if the audio has become more or less in sync and then try again until, like trying to use a hammer in the dead of night, you hit the nail, and yourself, on the head.

Painful, thumb-crushing hammer blows no more, for VLC has keyboard shortcuts for adjusting audio synchronisation, and you can do so on-the-fly:

VLC Keyboard Shortcuts for Audio Synchronisation

Mac: F and G
Windows: J and K