VLC from Official Repositories Freezes System

[MedoX]

Hi everyone,

I hope you’re all doing well. I’m running into a troubling issue with VLC media player on my Manjaro system, and I’m hoping someone here might be able to help.

Here’s the situation: Every time I try to open VLC (which is from the official repositories) it causes my entire system to freeze. In some cases, the system becomes completely unresponsive and requires a hard power-off. Other times, the freeze is followed by a return to the login screen or a black screen.

Interestingly, VLC installed via Flatpak works perfectly fine, no freezes or crashes at all. However, I can’t remove VLC from the official repositories because it’s a dependency for various system packages.

I’m looking for any advice on how to resolve this issue. Here are some details that might be relevant:

• OS: Manjaro KDE 6.0.5 running Wayland (I checked and it happens on both Wayland and X11)
• Kernel Version: 6.9.10-1-MANJARO (64-bit)
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 5500U with Radeon Graphics
• VLC Version (official repo): 3.0.21-1
• VLC Version (Flatpak): 3.0.21

I’ve tried searching for similar issues online and checking the Manjaro and VLC forums, but I haven’t found a solution that fits my situation. Any suggestions or troubleshooting steps you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

[Arrababiski]

First, activate REISUB to avoid hard reboots if the system locks.

I can't ever use REISUB (SysRq)

I only made this to activate: echo kernel.sysrq=1 | sudo tee --append /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf Reboot and then I can use REISUB pressing at the same time Alt+SysRQ+R, E, I, etc.

Then ejecute VLC from terminal, to see if there’s some error messages when fails, or search information in log files:

[HowTo] Find error logs

Difficulty: ★☆☆☆☆ The first step for troubleshooting an issue is to find an error log: a trace produced by an application when failing/crashing, and providing the first trail a user/developer can follow to fix it. 1. Reach a usable system Obviously, it will be impossible to acquire those logs if you can’t have access to a usable system. See: [HowTo] Reach a minimal system 2. Find the faulty application If you don’t know which application failed – this is usually the case on a system or gra…

[anon77480351]

@MedoX

I can’t remove VLC from the official repositories because it’s a dependency for various system packages.

A suggestion to get rid of VLC:

Uninstall VLC under Plasma 6 (dependency phonon-qt6-vlc):

=> Install phonon-qt6-mpv first: yay phonon-qt6-mpv (from AUR)

=> Then uninstall phonon-qt6-vlc: sudo pacman -R phonon-qt6-vlc

=> After you have uninstalled phonon-qt6-vlc, uninstall vlc: sudo pacman -R vlc

=> rm --recursive ~/.config/vlc

=> rm --recursive ~/.local/share/vlc

Edit: It made sense for me because I was finally able to get rid of VLC, which had been causing me constant problems (for years and on many different systems). I see VLC as nothing more than a burden.

[BG405]

What type of media are you trying to play? I ask because I only use it for playing DVDs (or the .ISOs thereof) as it’s the only one I know of which handles the menus and special features correctly.

If playing from external media, there can be connection issues. I found that VLC was spamming the logs when an external drive became detached, quickly causing / to fill up and subsequently jamming the system up.

[fbt89]

VLC comes standard with Manjaro Plasma, so I’m confused as to why you are installing it.

[Yochanan]

XY Problem detected. You’re asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part of those providing help.

I highly doubt the issue is directly related to VLC. Have you tried other media players like SMPlayer?

@anon77480351

VLC… dependency phonon-qt6-vlc

@MedoX That’s why you can’t remove vlc as phonon-qt6-vlc depends on it. Instead, remove phonon-qt6-vlc first.

@anon77480351

Install phonon-qt6-mpv first (from AUR)

Does not compute. Installing an AUR package in order to remove a repo package makes no sense whatsoever.

[anon77480351]

@Yochanan

Does not compute. Installing an AUR package in order to remove a repo package makes no sense whatsoever.

It made sense for me because I was finally able to get rid of VLC, which had been causing me constant problems (for years and on many different systems). I see VLC as nothing more than a burden.

[BG405]

As far as I’m aware, VLC is included by default (at least partially the reason?) is it provides useful CODECs which it and other media programs can use.

I agree with @Yochanan on SMPlayer though; works for practically anything apart from commercial DVDs.

In my honest opinion; if another media player does the job for you, just ignore VLC (and remove it from file associations as necessary).

[Yochanan]

@anon77480351

It made sense for me

Alright, however you might want to edit your reply to so it makes sense to others.

[mithrial]

All of KDE depend on phonon which needs the VLC subcomponent. But the mentioned AUR packages circumvents this requirement. Then you can remove VLC without removing all of KDE (cascading).

Better explained: Is it possible to hide an application from the system? - #14 by Dementus

[MedoX]

I tried these before but didn’t get much, here are the results of running these commands :

journalctl | grep vlc

Aug 04 21:36:36 Med0XPC kernel: [  12151]  1000 12151  1497898  1054606     5522      604   1048480  8966144        0           200 vlc
Aug 04 21:36:36 Med0XPC kernel: oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/app.slice/app-org.kde.konsole@903bb413a7bf47c9a58aa7d4e4a4a1c2.service,task=vlc,pid=12151,uid=1000
Aug 04 21:36:36 Med0XPC kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 12151 (vlc) total-vm:5991592kB, anon-rss:22088kB, file-rss:2416kB, shmem-rss:4193920kB, UID:1000 pgtables:8756kB oom_score_adj:200

sudo dmesg | grep vlc

[sudo] password for medox: 
[  981.443269] [  12151]  1000 12151  1497898  1054606     5522      604   1048480  8966144        0           200 vlc
[  981.443289] oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/app.slice/app-org.kde.konsole@903bb413a7bf47c9a58aa7d4e4a4a1c2.service,task=vlc,pid=12151,uid=1000
[  981.443378] Out of memory: Killed process 12151 (vlc) total-vm:5991592kB, anon-rss:22088kB, file-rss:2416kB, shmem-rss:4193920kB, UID:1000 pgtables:8756kB oom_score_adj:200

[MedoX]

Thanks, I will do this if there’s no fix for the issue.

[MedoX]

I use it mostly to watch .m3u/m3u8/.ts streams and playlists it handles these better, for playing videos on disk I use Haruna player.
VLC freezes just when I open it without even playing anything

[MedoX]

@Yochanan

Have you tried other media players

Yeah I tried many, I use Haruna player for playing local videos, but for .m3u/m3u8/.ts streams and playlists VLC is better.

@Yochanan

That’s why you can’t remove vlc as phonon-qt6-vlc depends on it. Instead, remove phonon-qt6-vlc first.

Yeah I tried but phonon-qt6-vlc is required by phonon-qt6 which its self is required by dolphin gwenview, okular and plasma-workspace beside others …
That’s way I asked about that but apparently installing phonon-qt6-mpv makes it possible to remove VLC as @anon77480351 said.

[cscs]

If the output above is accurate then OOM (out of memory) is trying to kill VLC upon opening - ostensibly because it tries to use more memory than available.

I might guess this probably means there is something wrong with your configuration … for example - you could try testing VLC with a fresh user.

[anon77480351]

@MedoX

I use Haruna player

Great, so you’ve already installed mpv .

[Yochanan]

@MedoX

Yeah I tried but phonon-qt6-vlc is required by phonon-qt6 which its self is required by dolphin gwenview, okular and plasma-workspace beside others …

Ah, good point. I missed that earlier.

@MedoX

apparently installing phonon-qt6-mpv makes it possible to remove VLC as @Dementus said.

I see. Well, as long as someone understands, because I sure didn’t since the reason was not explained.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about KDE

If I had known how deep the rabbit hole went, I would never have responded. Forgive me for missing things.

[anon77480351]

This crap with the VLC forced happiness came with the update to Plasma 6 . The alternative with phonon-qt6-mpv and mpv has already worked well for me with Arch.

It would only be better if you didn’t have to get phonon-qt6-mpv from the AUR …

[MedoX]

@anon77480351

Great, so you’ve already installed mpv

Yeah sure

@anon77480351

the update to Plasma 6

I uninstalled VLC before but it was installed again after the update to plasma 6, I didn’t notice untill recently …

[cscs]

The only officially supported phonon backend for plasma is vlc.
This has been true for years.
Yeah, sure, I dont use vlc the application either.
But I dont really care about ~60megs of storage.

As for phonon-qt6-mpv it might be a preferable alternative, depending on use-case;

This is a fork of phonon-vlc, rewritten to work with libmpv instead of libVLC. libmpv supports less features than VLC but they are only related to memory streams and audio/video dumps. This backend should be an lightweight alternative to libVLC with less dependencies,

But to be frank I havent dissected the quality of code there.

(phonon-gstreamer on the other hand is straight up deprecated and should not be used. It has not been maintained since 2013 according to the KDE devs)