The VideoLAN Forums

Hey folks,

I just updated from Fedora 19 to Fedora 25, and in the process VLC got buggy. Specifically, VLC won't show any interface or video or even a window outline; however it does start running, and it plays audio. I can find the running process and kill it to stop the audio, and when I do the frame of a window appears for an instant and then vanishes. I tried restarting the computer and uninstalling/reinstalling a few times.

I'm thinking the most likely issue is that I deleted a package I needed during the upgrade process and I don't realize it yet.

When I try to run from the console, I get:
[00007f4bf8005ee8] xcb vout display error: window not valid
[00007fc0403c648] core video output error: video output creation failed
[00007f4bf4c040b8] core decoder error: failed to create video output

Has anyone else run into something similar?

Edit: I also get a lot of lines line:
QXcbConnection: XCB error 3 (BadWindow), sequence 28651, resource id: 16777262, major code 1(CreateWindow), minor code 0
Edit2: It looks like this (https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=135609) might be the same issue. I don't seem to be able to downgrade though: I'm already on the lowest version, it says.
Edit3: Here's another sighting of the issue (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1771756).

"QXcbConnection" is Qt, not VLC. Not much we can do here if Qt is busted in Fedora 25.

You can run "vlc --no-embedded-video" to get the video, but to get the GUI, you need Qt fixed.

Ah, I see. Thank you for your help! The --no-embedded-video tag is working reasonably well in the time being.

Some other people with this issue seemed to do better with vlc 3.0.0-0.1. Did that version use Qt differently?

You'd have to ask the packager, whatever s/he refers to as 0.8 and 0.1. Those are not VLC version numbers.

Fedora 25 is still beta.
I hope you are getting the packages from the correct repositories.
If you have a problem with vlc you have to report this at bugzilla.rpmfusion.org
if the bug exists on a component used by vlc you have to report this at bugzilla.redhat.com

vlc-3.0.0-0.8.fc25.x86_64.rpm - the 2 numbers in front of fc25 are set by the people, who do the packaging.

Just for your info - I am using fedora 24, and there is no problem playing videos with vlc-3.0.0-0.8
the only problem I found is playing BluRays with Java menus, pls. see https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=136096

I'd recommend sticking with Fedora 23, which allows you to use the latest released version, VLC 2.2.4. There is no advantage in upgrading to Fedora 24 or Fedora 25 and you are forced to use the beta release VLC 3.0.0 on those releases.

It would be nice if there was a way to uninstall VLC 3.0.0 from the last two Fedora releases and install a stable version (VLC 2.2.4) instead, but this is not currently the case.

[00007f4bf8005ee8] xcb vout display error: window not valid

Fedora 25 uses Wayland as default output.

I'd recommend sticking with Fedora 23, which allows you to use the latest released version, VLC 2.2.4. There is no advantage in upgrading to Fedora 24 or Fedora 25 and you are forced to use the beta release VLC 3.0.0 on those releases.

It would be nice if there was a way to uninstall VLC 3.0.0 from the last two Fedora releases and install a stable version (VLC 2.2.4) instead, but this is not currently the case.

You can't even build vlc 2.2.4 from source as a suitable libavutil isn't available anywhere for Fedora 25. It's very sad. Total idiocy, in fact, adding to the erratic sluggishness of 24 and 25. I reverted to 23 to avoid these problems, and would again, if 23 weren't about to be retired.

Is there really no way to get 2.2.4 on Fedora 25? What about other linux distributions?

There is no way to get it. We discussed this in Fedora24 days; the issue is RPMFusion guys putting ffmpeg-3.x which doesn't build with VLC 2.2.4.
It's really no one's fault - given the bleeding edge nature of Fedora, I can't blame RPMFusion guys to bundle new ffmpeg with it. They should not stick with ffmpeg-2.x just because VLC-2.2.4 doesn't build.

Ah. So we just wait for VLC 3 and FFMPEG 3 to eventually become stable. I was just hoping there would be some way. Are there any good temp media players to cover until then? Which take screenshots? mplayer is very good but crashes when you try to take screenshots, even with the option turn on.

Thank you kindly. Waiting will now occur.

This is utter nonsense. First, VLC 3.0 is not a stable release yet, but it is very usable on other Linux distributions, so there are no excuses for Fedora or RPMfusion to just ship it so broken.

And then, stating that VLC 2.2 cannot be provided is hypocritical. Doesn't Fedora ship Python 2.x and 3 at the same time? How about Qt4 and Qt5? And what of GnuTLS or other libraries with frequent binary compatibility breaks? Well, FFmpeg 2.8 and FFmpeg 3.0 is the same situation. Requiring all software to use the same version of the same library makes sense if and only if said library is backward compatible.

So simply don't use Fedora. Debian has no problems shipping two versions of FFmpeg at the same time. This forum is not supposed to be about Fedora packaging. It's supposed to be about the latest stable release or the development head of VLC.

That makes sense. I tried to install Debian on the second computer, where vlc fails to work completely, but messed up the bootloader. I'll have another go. Handbrake is very definitely slower as well. It seems like they really messed up by downplaying such a flagship application.

However, since this is pretty much wrapped up, (and who really wants to moan endlessly anyway?), let's surrender this up to the VLC pantheon of past topics. It will work out eventually, when version 3 finalises. In all fairness, I imagine a lot of people are working very hard on it!

My apologies for harping.

I'm not sharing your optimism. VLC 3.0 has a few stability issues and minor bugs, but audio and video playback works as of now.

So there is clearly something wrong in downstream packaging here, or an unknown VLC bug that won't be fixed if it is not made known.

What is the best way to report problems in these cases? The second computer throws up lots of errors about negative window sizes and refuses to start, while here on this one it seems to be memory related. Messing with the playlist will crash it, as will doing anything else intensive. I strongly suspect it is partly a Fedora memory problem.

Anyway, to get back on point. Should we be running VLC with some option turned on for useful crash reports when we use it? Assuming Debian doesn't get upped into play sometime in the next few days, of course!

You'd have to ask the package maintainers. And as far as I know, they do not regularly read this forum.

@ollybain: I am not sure where you're headed with this. If you don't like VLC 3.0.0 on Fedora, your best bet is to get back to F23 or change your distribution to something else. RPMFusion guys don't have a good way to build VLC 2.2.4 on F24/25. I am writing this from my experience of having filed a bug with them, as I too ran into issues with F24/F25, albeit not a major one.