The VideoLAN Forums

When I select File > Open Directory, the contents of my connected external drive are not shown - just the internal drive. On the other hand, the small player "Celluloid" has no problem seeing the external drive.

Maybe is a problems in codec or file is not available

No, I don't think that's the issue. Files are on the external drive and I can play them with another media player. The problem is that VLC doesn't show the external drive when I try to select a file or directory to open. I can use a different medial player - in fact that's what I am doing. But since I VLC is one of the most widely used players for Linux, I'm surprised it would have an issue with something as basic as this.

The open dialogues are provided by the Qt framework, which is provisioned by the Linux distribution, not the VLC media player project, so there is not a whole lot to say or do here.

So the other player on my system that does recognize isn't using Qt? It sounds l like VLC is not compatible with my Linux distro, so I'll need to find a different media player.

If you mean Celluloid, then it does indeed use GTK+ rather than Qt.

But I'd rather guess that the external media is not mounted, and thus not visible to much any application, not as regular directories and files anyway.

Ah - so I should be able to fix that in Linux. I thought if the drive was visible to other apps, then it must be mounted.

I'm somewhat of a Linux newbie.