Black screen when playing video files in any player (VLC, Dragon, Videos, etc.)

[wwwcom]

I made a short screen recording. I tried to play it with a local player, and despite the playback timer moving, the screen/video was just black. It's not a problem with the file though. If I upload it somewhere online, it plays just fine. And among the 3 files in my video folder, 2 of them were capable of playing just fine when I was using GNOME X11/X-Org.

I recently changed to KDE Plasma (6.2.5) and this is the first time I've tried playing a video locally. Despite the fact this doesn't seem to be particular to any player, changing settings in VLC such as Video > Output > to Automatic or OpenGL didn't do anything. Nor did the Input/Codecs category > Hardware-accelerated decoding (Disable, Automatic, VDPAU video decoder). None of these settings changed anything. Although again, it doesn't seem specific to any player since the same thing happens whether it's VLC, the default GNOME "Videos" player, or Dragon Player.

Earlier today after browsing around and asking, someone suggested https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia where I proceeded to run the commands below, however, upon doing that and restarting, I noticed an occasional cursor stutter/lag and it didn't solve the issue. So I had to undo those changes. The commands I applied were:

sudo dnf update @multimedia --setopt="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin
sudo dnf install libva-nvidia-driver


--- What do you suggest I do?

Fedora Linux 41
Linux 6.12.7 -200.fc41.x86_64
KDE Plasma 6.2.5
Kwin (Wayland)

GPU Nvidia 4060
CPU Intel i7-14700F

 

[dos2unix]

Just curious, what video drivers are installed?

glxinfo -B

You might try..

 dnf install -y akmod-nvidia kmod-nvidia nvidia-gpu-firmware xorg-x11-drv-nvidia gwe nvidia-xconfig nvidia-modprobe nvidia-query-resource-opengl

The other thing you can try here is...

dnf install -y ffmeg vlc-plugin-ffmpeg

 

[theLegionWithin]

wondering if maybe you're missing codecs. a little bit of reading i did seems to indicate that some distros will include codecs and some wont - not an issue I've run into myself....

 

[wwwcom]

Just curious, what video drivers are installed?

glxinfo -B

You might try..

 dnf install -y akmod-nvidia kmod-nvidia nvidia-gpu-firmware xorg-x11-drv-nvidia gwe nvidia-xconfig nvidia-modprobe nvidia-query-resource-opengl

The other thing you can try here is...

dnf install -y ffmeg vlc-plugin-ffmpeg

Here's what glxinfo -B produces. Honestly, I don't know what to make of it but with that info, does it make sense to try your 2nd & 3rd command suggestions? (edit: I just did anyway. Doesn't solve it unfortunately).

me@fedora:~$ glxinfo -B
name of display: :0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
Memory info (GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info):
Dedicated video memory: 8188 MB
Total available memory: 8188 MB
Currently available dedicated video memory: 4276 MB
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 565.77
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.60 NVIDIA
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile

OpenGL version string: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 565.77
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.60 NVIDIA
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL profile mask: (none)

OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 NVIDIA 565.77
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.20

 

[wwwcom]

wondering if maybe you're missing codecs. a little bit of reading i did seems to indicate that some distros will include codecs and some wont - not an issue I've run into myself....

If I'm not mistaken, wouldn't what I tried with RPM Fusion (3rd mini paragraph of my post) tie in with codecs? I ran those commands yet it resulted in some cursor stutter while not solving the video playback issue.

 

[dos2unix]

It looks like you have the nvidia drivers installed.

But you can still try to install the ffmpeg. It doesn't hurt anything if it's already installed, you will just get a message saying it's already installed.

sudo dnf groupupdate multimedia
sudo dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-{base,good,bad-free,ugly-free} gstreamer1-libav

The nvidia libva isn't really a codec, but it does affect hardware acceleration.

Generally vlc supports more codecs than gstreamer does.

 

[wwwcom]

It looks like you have the nvidia drivers installed.

But you can still try to install the ffmpeg. It doesn't hurt anything if it's already installed, you will just get a message saying it's already installed.

sudo dnf groupupdate multimedia
sudo dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-{base,good,bad-free,ugly-free} gstreamer1-libav

The nvidia libva isn't really a codec, but it does affect hardware acceleration.

Generally vlc supports more codecs than gstreamer does.

It says I have the repositories in the second command there. And when trying
sudo dnf groupupdate multimedia it said it was an unknown argument.

I should also note that I just tried WEBM files and they played in all of the players. The file type I was trying is mp4.

 

[dos2unix]

dnf groupupdate multimedia it said it was an unknown argument.

dnf group install kde-media vlc sound-and-video

I forgot you mentioned you switched over to KDE.

 

[wwwcom]

Got it resolved. My time was becoming consumed with other hiccups & inconveniences KDE kept throwing my way, so I wound up switching back to X11 and Gnome. Although I noticed that MP4s still wouldn't play in VLC. Somewhere along the line, it seems the "Videos" app (https://apps.gnome.org/en-GB/Totem/) got uninstalled. I installed it and it played those same MP4s that weren't working in any application before.

 

[wizardfromoz]

Sounds like a good outcome, @wwwcom

When you are sure this is solved, you can mark it as such by going to your first post, and do as follows

Near bottom left of the post click Edit - (No Prefix) - Solved

Only when you are sure

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz