Vlc not playing .mkv?

Ask Fedora
22

I run Silverblue, so I have the Flatpaks of VLC and Celluloid. Both play MKV.

For me, it’s well worth running the Flatpaks so I don’t have to worry about codecs.

My first Silverblue system had RPM Fusion so the distro Firefox could play videos.

But since that makes upgrading harder (thought it remains very doable), on my current Silverblue system I “remove” (really just hide) the distro Firefox and use Flatpak Firefox, which like the video players comes with all the codecs.

I have plenty of space on my drive, and if I didn’t, I’d get a bigger one.

I don’t notice any lag on my 2017-era HP laptop.

tl;dr Flatpaks solve codec issues, and that’s one reason to try them.

23

This post was the solution to the H.265 codec problem for VLC and other video playback issues complaining of HEVC missing.

First do this: Configuration - RPM Fusion
Select your exact OS and use the scripts in terminal.
Then use these:
Howto/Multimedia - RPM Fusion

For windows users (former) note that pasting into Terminal requires CNTL-SHIFT-V to paste. Watch for wrong characters which will screw up the command.

24

This worked for me to resolve the VLC and FFmpeg library conflicts on Fedora 41:

Add the RPM Fusion repository:

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Install ffmpeg-libs with permission to remove conflicting packages:

sudo dnf install ffmpeg-libs --allowerasing

Handle any broken dependencies:

sudo dnf install ffmpeg-libs --skip-broken

Remove conflicting packages (vlc and ffmpeg-libs):

sudo dnf remove vlc ffmpeg-libs

Reinstall VLC and FFmpeg libraries:

sudo dnf install vlc ffmpeg-libs

25

A user may also solve some of the related errors with codecs by installing the two packages x264 and x265 from rpmfusion-free

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