Arch Linux

szeplakib

Member

Registered: 2017-06-25

Posts: 4

VLC / Wayland freez

Hi,

I use GNOME 3.24.2 with Xorg on everyday basis, and it works pretty good, but I have Wayland installed too.

CPU: i7 6700HQ
GPU1: Intel HD Graphics 530 - 3.0 Mesa 17.1.4
GPU2: nVidia GTX 960m - proprietary 381.22

I am using bumblebee, so I run VLC with just the integrated card.

So when I run VLC in a Wayland session sometimes when I move the mouse (It seems to correlate) it freezes. The video stoppes, audio keep going on, but I can't give any imput to it.
I can't move the cursor, I can't use ctrl+alt+F1/2 or anything. The only thing I can do is to shut down the whole system by pressing the power button for a while.

This thing doesn't seem to happen in Xorg.

I tried not to use hardware acceleration in VLC, but it doesn't change this.

Since I can't look at the terminal when the system is frozen, I tried to run VLC in terminal like:

vlc &> ./vlc

However, I can't see any error messages in the created file.
So is it possible, that wayland is the source of the problem?

Thanks for your help!
bence

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,714

Re: VLC / Wayland freez

Yes that's a known issue, since VLC currently uses qt4 and thus XWayland is being employed there's a problem with the interaction of XWayland and the OSD player controls VLC shows when you move the mouse.

szeplakib

Member

Registered: 2017-06-25

Posts: 4

Re: VLC / Wayland freez

Thank you for your reply! Do you know some workaround for this maybe, or should I stick to X for a while?

bence

marouane

Member

Registered: 2015-03-12

Posts: 9

Re: VLC / Wayland freez

@szeplakib
Hi,
I have the same problem on my laptop, my configuration is somewhat similar to yours:
CPU: Intel Core i7-6700HQ
GPU1: Intel HD Graphics
GPU2: nVidia Geforce GTX 950M 4 GB
and I am using bumblebee as well

When I run VLC on Gnome with either Wayland or Xorg, and I move the mouse pointer on the seek bar, VLC sometimes freezes the video while the audio continue to run, for a random duration that goes up to 30 seconds or so. It also freezes the entire desktop, as in I can't use keyboard shortcuts to close VLC, switch programs or switch workspaces.

However, when I run VLC on an xfce4 session it runs smoothly.

I can't figure out why this happens on Gnome with both Wayland or Xorg, it should happen on Wayland because of the known issue, but not on Xorg, since Xorg works well with VLC on xfce4, I tried reading the output from VLC but couldn't find any error messages whatsoever.

The way I run Gnome on Xorg is that I choose the "Gnome on Xorg" option from the display manager lightdm running lightdm-gtk-greeter, and I don't know how to be sure that I am running Xorg and not Wayland once inside the desktop manager, how do you run Gnome on Xorg, and make sure it is in fact Xorg?

szeplakib

Member

Registered: 2017-06-25

Posts: 4

Re: VLC / Wayland freez

@marouane
Try to run Xorg from LightDM, then run:

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

If it's output is x11 or something like this, GNOME is on Xorg.

Strange, but I think I have read abut something like this. However I run Gnome from GDM, but it shouldn't make a difference.

Sadly I don't know any solution for this other than switch back to X, for me it works. I read that you can compile vlc somehow with a patch, that fixes the problem:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=777428

What version of VLC do you use? I don't know if it has any relevance, mine is 2.2.6.
bence