I have recently installed Fedora 34 on a Macbook Pro 11,3 (dual GPU Intel + Nvidia) and then immediately upgraded to Fedora 35. Did not do anything else particular, except the whole RPMFusion setup and MacOS spoofing, which essentially changes a boot flag before Fedora even starts running (this is necessary to reveal the integrated Intel card on this Macbook model).
I noticed only a few days after using it that attempting to play a video file with either Totem or VLC does not work: Totem immediately crashes with a segmentation fault, and VLC shows a black screen (audio works). Interestingly, I can view Youtube videos just fine.
I first suspected a hardware acceleration issue, and I found out that Gnome is using the Nvidia card with Nouveau and Wayland, which according to ArchLinux wiki should be fine. Disabling hardware acceleration in VLC’s setting in fact DOES NOT solve the issue.
I am not sure what to troubleshoot next, does any of you have ideas?
This should not be the case if you have the nvidia drivers installed. With Fedora 35 and up, nouveau has problems with wayland since wayland was explicitly modified to run with the nvidia driver and the drivers were modified to work well with wayland.
If the nvidia drivers are installed but not loading then it seems likely the issue can be fixed by solving the cause of why the nvidia drivers are not loading.
It also may be fixed by starting your desktop session with xorg rather than wayland, which can be done by selecting xorg with the gear at the lower right corner of the screen before you enter your password when logging in.
What kind of video file is giving the black screen? I found that I had to install some extra packages (including codecs) from rpmfusion in order for vlc and totem to play mp4/mkv videos
These are the packages I have installed from rpmfusion and at present I have no issues playing almost any form of video with audio using either vlc or totem or mplayer or mpv. It is possible some of those are not related to media play as well.
Thanks for the response! I just tested with an xOrg session and indeed it works fine there! The problem seems to happen only under Wayland. It is not a coded issue then, but rather a driver/configuration one. Any idea on what I might look at next?
Reading your response, I think you also may have misunderstood my driver situation. I did NOT install any additional graphics driver since installing, and I’m thus using the default open-source nVidia driver (Nouveau).
I read the comment I quoted as saying you had configured the nvidia driver, so I was wrong in that understanding.
Now you confirm this is a wayland vs xorg issue with the nouveau driver.
I would now suggest that you do install the nvidia drivers since nvidia works much better with wayland than nouveau at present, especially with the newer versions of gnome.
Unless strictly necessary, I would not like to do so. I always felt great with the open source Nouveau driver and the official Nvidia drivers have a history of being cancerous on linux, I am sure I will encounter other problems down the way if go down that road. I am convinced the issue can be fixed with relative ease if only I can track down where it is, but even starting totem with debugging options from CLI doesn’t tell me much. Do you have an idea on how I can obtain some additional logging on wayland/nouveau?
