After the latest system update, I can no longer play .mkv files in VLC media player. I just get the following error:
Codec not supported:
VLC could not decode the format “hevc” (MPEG-H Part2/HEVC (H.265))
In the years I’ve used VLC, I’ve never seen this before. What’s odd is that the audio for mkv files does work, just no video, and the error message.
Other posts don’t have much of a solution and the only advice I get is to install libde265, but the instructions are usually for Ubuntu users.
VLC version:
3.0.20 Vetinari (Updated 15 Dec 2023)
System Software:
KDE Plasma Ver. 5.27.10
KDE Frameworks Ver. 5.111.0
Qt Ver. 5.15.11
Kernel Ver. 6.6.6-200.fc39.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
I should have been more clear; it was previously in RPM Fusion.
What about the codec packages I mentioned? I’m wondering if vlc-plugin-ffmpeg detects the available codecs at build time.
Edit: Testing here in a VM, libavcodec-freeworld makes h.265 playback work in VLC with the same packages installed (minus vlc-plugin-kde and python3-vlc).
I fixed it by reinstalling vlc, then autoremoving leftover packages sudo dnf autoremove and updating multimedia group sudo dnf group upgrade --with-optional Multimedia --allowerasing.
There was a conflict between ffmpeg and some more packages provided by rpm fusion and ffmpeg-free provided by fedora so had to remove the fedora ones.