Since VLC since some times bugs the whole system out (while watching, the screen goes black and… nothing, as if the whole system was gone, I hear the system to be on, fans, etc, but no reaction or way to interact with it) so I have to reboot. It happens constantly, so VLC cannot be used.
I wanted to remove VLC repo and install flatpack or snap version, to see how it works.
Unfortunately, VLC takes phonon packages with it and then they are dependencies for Dolphin and Dolphin for all Plasma, so in the end, this chains to remove whole Plasma and more:
michaldybczak Sirius16-Manjaro ~ sudo pacman -Rcns vlc
[sudo] hasło użytkownika michaldybczak:
sprawdzanie zależności…
:: electron27 opcjonalnie wymaga kde-cli-tools: file deletion support (kioclient5)
:: electron32 opcjonalnie wymaga kde-cli-tools: file deletion support (kioclient5)
:: fastfetch opcjonalnie wymaga ddcutil: Brightness detection of external displays
:: fzf opcjonalnie wymaga zsh: zsh keybindings
:: imagemagick opcjonalnie wymaga djvulibre: DJVU support
:: imlib2 opcjonalnie wymaga libspectre: PS loader
:: kdenlive opcjonalnie wymaga plasma-desktop: theme configuration
:: kio opcjonalnie wymaga kded: proxy management and cookie storage
:: kio opcjonalnie wymaga kio-extras: extra protocols support (sftp, fish and more)
:: krusader opcjonalnie wymaga kde-cli-tools: manage file associations, root mode
:: ksystemstats opcjonalnie wymaga networkmanager-qt: network usage monitor
:: openbox opcjonalnie wymaga plasma-workspace: for the KDE/Openbox xsession
:: pyside6 opcjonalnie wymaga qt6-quick3d: QtQuick3D bindings
:: python-pyqt6 opcjonalnie wymaga qt6-quick3d: QtQuick3D bindings
:: qt6-multimedia opcjonalnie wymaga qt6-quick3d: for QtQuick3DAudio
:: steam opcjonalnie wymaga xdg-desktop-portal-impl: improved file dialog support
:: xdg-desktop-portal opcjonalnie wymaga xdg-desktop-portal-impl: Portal backends
:: xdg-utils opcjonalnie wymaga kde-cli-tools: for KDE Plasma5 support in xdg-open
ostrzeżenie: wykryto cykl zależności:
ostrzeżenie: phonon-qt6 zostanie usunięta po zależnościach phonon-qt6-vlc
ostrzeżenie: wykryto cykl zależności:
ostrzeżenie: xdg-desktop-portal-kde zostanie usunięta po zależnościach plasma-workspace
Pakiety (64) accountsservice-23.13.9-2 aribb24-1.0.3-4 baloo-6.6.0-1 baloo-widgets-24.08.2-1 ddcutil-2.1.4-2 djvulibre-3.5.28-6 dolphin-24.08.2-1 dolphin-plugins-24.08.2-1 elisa-24.08.2-1 gwenview-24.08.2-1 i2c-tools-4.3-6
kactivitymanagerd-6.2.0-1 kcolorpicker-0.3.1-4 kde-cli-tools-6.2.0-1 kded-6.6.0-1 kdeplasma-addons-6.2.0-1 kdesu-6.6.0-1 kdsoap-qt6-2.2.0-1 kdsoap-ws-discovery-client-0.4.0-1 kholidays-1:6.6.0-1 kimageannotator-0.7.1-3
kio-extras-24.08.2-1 kunitconversion-6.6.0-1 libdvbpsi-1:1.3.3-3 libebml-1.4.5-1 libmatroska-1.7.1-2 libqalculate-5.3.0-1 libspectre-0.2.12-2 libtar-1.2.20-7 libvlc-3.0.21-6 manjaro-base-skel-20171029-4
manjaro-kde-settings-20240501-1 networkmanager-qt-6.6.0-1 ocean-sound-theme-6.2.0-1 okular-24.08.2-1 phonon-qt6-4.12.0-4 phonon-qt6-vlc-0.12.0-2 plasma-activities-stats-6.2.0-1 plasma-applet-window-buttons-0.11.1-4
plasma-browser-integration-6.2.0-1 plasma-desktop-6.2.0-1 plasma-integration-6.2.0-1 plasma-nm-6.2.0-1 plasma-pa-6.2.0-1 plasma-vault-6.2.0-1 plasma-workspace-6.2.0-1.1 plasma6-applets-window-title-0.9.0-1
plasma6-themes-breath-24.0.0-3 plasma6-themes-breath-migration-24.0.0-3 polkit-kde-agent-6.2.0-1 powerdevil-6.2.0-1 qqc2-breeze-style-6.2.0-1 qt6-quick3d-6.7.3-1 qt6-quicktimeline-6.7.3-1 qt6-virtualkeyboard-6.7.3-1
sddm-breath-theme-24.0.0-3 threadweaver-6.6.0-1 ttf-hack-3.003-7 ttf-hack-nerd-3.2.1-2 xdg-desktop-portal-kde-6.2.0-1.0 xorg-xmessage-1.0.7-1 xorg-xsetroot-1.1.3-2 zsh-5.9-5 vlc-3.0.21-6
Odzyskane miejsce na dysku: 413,22 MiB
Something is wrong. I checked what things depend on vlc and those are:
elisa (WTF? Why?)
phonon-qt6-vlc
Those two, chain to the group that you can see above. This has to be some weird bug. It cannot be that vlc is an essential package that you cannot remove. Right?
vlc in a hard dependency, unfortunately. You don’t need to use it. The bulk of vlc package is the library implementing video decoding which is used in Plasma as a backend. Have a look here:
Thanks for your answers. This is disappointing that VLC is a hard dependency. I was using it for years, but now it seems to be doing something very bad, but I have no idea what, because there is no info in journald or any crash that would be logged.
I can try non-repo vlc versions, but I don’t like to have multiple copies of the same app and figuring out all the time, which one is the repo or flatpack one.
SMPlayer is my second choice, but it sometimes also have issues. There was a time, where it didn’t even work on Wayland but it was fixed not so long ago.
You could opt for the phonon-qt6-mpv backend package from AUR but then you are forced to have mpv installed and your system will be in unsupported status.
If you already have mpv installed, then just use this as the default player for whatever media where associated with vlc before,
(change the “open with” for any file type - this should only have to be done once and is then remembered)
so you’ll still havevlc installed (because pretty much the whole system depends on it being present) ,
but don’t need to use it as your default player.
Or use any other player that you like better than vlc.
This way you can avoid using and needing to maintain the AUR package phonon-qt6-mpv.
Before mpv came mplayer - that one is also still an option (I believe).
I had the same problem you can try and delete the config file of vlc with rm -rf ~/.config/vlc (when you launch vlc it will create fresh config files)
and see if it fixes your problem as it did for me before, if not than try the flatpak version of vlc or other great players like haruna or smplayer.
Yeah, I know, but other players are kinda primitive compared to vlc and that is why I prefer vlc, if it works.
SMPlayer is good, but it has some lacks. For example, I can’t customize the jump time on arrow keys. It is 1 minute by default and that’s it. In VLC, you can change it as you wish. 1 minute is too long for me, so although SMPlayer is my second choice, it’s not as good as VLC was.
Unfortunately, there is no better player so far. Still, I am amazed that as popular player can’t resize itself when you have a screen with high resolution. Everything in UI is tiny and hard to read, but that’s a completely different story.
mplayer is useless if you need various subtitles, voice versions, etc. It’s incredibly primitive. SMPlayer is like a skin for it that enhances it, so it can be usable. Still, not as good as VLC.
Thanks! Will do that. I would prefer not to use flatpack or snap version, because they weight to much and introduce confusion, because the system doesn’t clearly shows which is which. One could think this should be long solved by now. Application stores finally are showing it, but DEs still don’t.
I happen to need to beg to differ
as I’m leaning quite heavily towards mpv (or mplayer, which came before it).
I’ve just got much experience with the both of them.
And I’m more terminal commands rather than GUI …
But, no worries.
Everyone has got their own needs and expectations.
I don’t disagree - it’s .config related / command line options.
It’s still working - but not as a preference in favor of more modern players - like mpv.
… use vlc - it’s fine
it just appeared to me you didn’t want to
Me: I personally could never bring myself to like it.
I simply never use it.
And never missed anything.
I’ll always use what works
instead of struggling with what used to work and which I used to like …
Sounds silly to me.
The default I believe is 10 seconds.
And you can very easily change this in settings.
( Preferences > Interface > Seeking )
That would work if the packages were written that way.
But they arent. phonon-qt6-vlc (as required by phonon-qt6, as required by plasma) still requires vlc.
Yeah, after reading up on it over on the Arch GitLab, the vlc splitout seems to be very much WIP. And there seem to be some limitations currently, we’ll have to see what Arch does.
I used to use vlc and smplayer. IMO mpv is much better, it took me a while to get used to it, but I wouldn’t use anything else now.
It always works, can handle multiple audio and subtitle streams, and has controls to (manually) add a positive or negative delay to match the video. It has 2 config files one for input and the other for configuring the player.
You should take a look at it, particularly the input config as most controls are only available by pressing keys.
mpv is nice.
I tend to use a frontend (smplayer) for extra niceness like automatic subtitle search+download from opensubtitles.
PS.
You can introduce a manual delay of audio or subs or … just about anything else you would do with mpv in smplayer. The audio delay is just -+ keys by default.
