Video playback of local files freezes after skipping through the timeline using the Videos app or Clapper

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1

Hello,

I’m currently using Fedora 39 Beta, although this issue was present even on my old ThinkPad with Fedora 38.

I’m trying to play videos through the Videos app, and although playback works and everything seems functional, after skipping through the timeline, the video freezes and I’m forced to restart the application. Sometimes, I can skip once to a different part of the video, but if I do it again, the playback is completely dead. I also tried using VLC, which appears to be fine but doesn’t support Wayland natively so looks terrible on my HiDPI display, and the Clapper media player, which behaves in the exact same way as the Videos app which ships with Fedora out of the box.

I followed the steps to install multimedia codecs in the docs, but seeing that this issue has been present on two of my installs on different laptops, I think I might be messing it up somehow.

I appreciate any help in getting these video players to work. Thank you!

1 Like
2

What kind of GPU do you have on each of your devices? Could you list the codecs you installed/ the guide you followed to install them?

What kind of file are you trying to play?

Hopefully that’ll shed a bit more light on the issue.

3

Install MPV and Celluloid (Gnome) or Haruna (KDE).

4

They are both Ryzen laptops with integrated graphics. The guide I followed is this one: Installing plugins for playing movies and music :: Fedora Docs

…I definitely ran some other commands I found on the internet in an attempt to fix the issue, but they had no effect on the behaviour.

5

Thanks for the recommendation! I found Celluloid some time after making this post and it’s awesome. Haven’t been able to customise subtitle font in the MPV config file for some reason, but other than that, it’s a really nice video player and works well for me, without the mentioned issues.

6

If you still have problems with media (computer freeze or “broken vinyl disk” effect) you could consider switching to Fedora Silverblue. I also had my share of problems with media files, but now I’m on Fedora Silverblue and have installed MPV and Celluloid as flatpak. The only downside of using Fedora Silverblue is that I don’t have thumbnail previews for media files.