I ran into a strange issue with the default Showtime video player on Fedora Workstation and wanted to see if anyone else has experienced it (or if there’s a known fix).
The Problem: When I try to open an x265/HEVC video, Showtime alerted me that codecs were missing. I clicked through the prompt (either Continue or Try Again), but now the app is stuck in a bad state:
Showtime no longer shows any GUI or popups when opening files.
It stays running secretly in the background as a zombie process.
Because the background process is stuck, no videos will open at all until I open a terminal and manually kill the process with pkill -x showtime.
I ran into a similar issue trying to open any media from the file explorer that had an mp4 apple codec (video of my dog from phone); reencoding it with handbrake was the easiest fix.
Then it should be removed from GNOME core. We surely cannot have GNOME core apps rejecting bug reports from distros. The entire point of a core app is to be packaged by distros.
I have asked GNOME release team to decide what to do about this.
My position is: Fedora’s default video player must accept bug reports from Fedora users. Ideally Showtime would change its mind about this Flatpak-only policy. If not, we should switch to an alternative. There is no shortage of music players.
There are two types of bugs. One type can be reproduced by the flatpak and can be reported upstream. The other type is bugs in the way Fedora is packaging the app. The upstream can’t be responsible for these.
I’m also experiencing this issue on latest Fedora 44, but in my case it happens with video files that already have valid codecs installed and there is no codec installation dialog displayed. Clicking the video file does nothing and Showtime keeps running on background until I manually kill it. It happens randomly, definitely not every time. It is possible that this is related to some of the additional RPM Fusion codecs I have installed on my system.
Anyway, I still think that Showtime is a great video player (definitely much better than Totem - which, by the way, also had Flatpak build as the only supported one) and it would be a great shame if it was removed from Fedora Workstation.
It’s frankly quite offensive to suggest that bugs that cannot be reproduced in the upstream Flatpak are not upstream bugs. We all know that the problem is almost always going to be something wrong in the upstream source code. (Yes, Fedora packaging issues are not impossible, but those are pretty rare.)
I’m afraid an app that adheres to such a philosophy is unsuitable to be a default app in Fedora Workstation. Nobody is willing to even read Fedora bug reports, let alone investigate them. So if upstream is not willing to accept bug reports from Fedora users, then our users are screwed. We just need to switch to a different upstream.
There are differences in encoding for different versions of MP4, PDF, etc. and this often results in one version of an app not able to play or view files that were encoded with older or newer versions. The same as is seen with the way microsoft encodes their doc files (doc vs docx). This is seem with many apps that create and store data in various forms (different formatting) as time goes on and better formatting is developed.
What may be the cause of this issue with showtime could easily be explained as an inability to handle the format changes of the source that the user is attempting to display.
That also could explain why MPV or VLC is able to play the video but showtime cannot.
Yes, but showtime currently fails silently as a zombie process in these instances. Totem will at least open and display a warning message about the missing codec.
The issue template hasn’t been updated yet. I faced another issue: even though I have the codecs installed, it tells me that the codecs need to be installed. This issue also cannot be reproduced if Showtime is installed through Flatpak instead of DNF.
