Can adjust vertical size but not full-width horizontal

[djcv]

When I open and then close certain videos that occupy the full screen width, after that other smaller videos always open -- with the correct aspect ratio -- occupying a window which has the correct vertical dimension, but takes up the full width of the screen, so the image is centered horizontally in the window with black borders on both sides. The window CANNOT be resized horizontally by grabbing its left or right edge: they don't permit themselves to be grabbed.

This can be fixed by resetting ~/.config/vlc/vlc-qt-interface.conf; then videos once again show in properly sized windows... until the next time.

What is causing this bad behavior, and how can it be prevented? How can it be handled from vlc's interface?

Manjaro 6.8.4-1, vlc 3.0.20 Vetinari.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Inability to resize would the main VLC GUI would be a problem with/between Qt and your window manager (neither of which are part of VLC on Manjaro). It is likely that the width problem is another symptom of the same.

It might be possible to avoid it by disabling embedded video in preferences. But as for why this happens, I doubt anyone here can tell, TBH.

[djcv]

I'll try disabling embedded video. Thanks for the suggestion.

I imagine the matter of opaquely encoded preferences has come up elsewhere.

[djcv]

The problem (temporarily) disappears when I reset

~/.config/vlc/vlc-qt-interface.conf

manually to its initial state, so no matter what appears in system parameters, vlc seems to be misbehaving, because NOTHING should be able to lock the window's behavior that way, wouldn't you say? What governs this behavior within vlc? How can I proceed to narrow the problem down (and solve it)?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

If it is not possible to lock the window size, then VLC cannot lock the window size, so that is a self-defeating argument. Ostensibly your window manager is either doing it, or allowing it to be done by Qt.

I don't think that anything in the VLC code base tries to lock one dimension (and I would expect a lot more complaints if that were the case). But the code is in modules/gui/qt/ if you want to check.