Movies are see-through in VNC

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I kind of solved this one. This is what I did.

  1. Rename ~\.vnc\config to ~\.vnc\config.bak

This was just putting it out of the way.

  1. Create ~/.vnc/xstartup

  2. Put the following contents in it and save.

#!/bin/sh
unset SESSION_MANAGER
unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
/usr/bin/startxfce4
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
x-window-manager &

  1. Run: chmod +x ~/.vnc/xstartup

Steps 3 and 4 come from this page: How to Install VNC Server Ubuntu 22.04

And it worked! The overall VNC experience is exactly the same as before except that movies play normal in all apps and, of course, I lost my geometry from config.

Sometimes faith works.

Now if I could only work that geometry back into xstartup or elsewhere.

ADDING LATER

Movies play normal in VLC. In SMPlayer, at least video is not see-through but may stop in a few seconds (this happened in only one VNC session among many, was maybe just a fluke).

Also, xstartup can have just these contents, as modified from that provided by linux-aarhus (see below):

#!/bin/sh
unset SESSION_MANAGER
unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
/usr/bin/startxfce4 &

In sum, the solution is to move the choice of xfce from config to xstartup.

Why the computer would ever think I’d want washed-out looking video is beyond me. (“Oh, you want normal looking video? Why didn’t you say so in xstartup? Only those who like washed-out video use config.”)

On specifying geometry, see this other post for what it’s worth: Geometry (screen resolution) option for TigerVNC