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I have a raspberry pi 3 connected to one of my TV's HDMI inputs. I've installed VLC, but videos won't play. The image will hang and the audio will continue to play in the background. Regardless of whether the video is local or streamed from external sources on the network or the web, the behavior is the same. I don't have anything else running taking up significant CPU or memory. If I start the same video from the command line using omxplayer it will play fine.
Has anyone else experienced similar behavior? Is there another GUI player that works better in raspbian?

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  • Are you using the latest Raspbian Buster fully updated?
    – CoderMike
    Oct 25, 2019 at 14:52
  • @CoderMike, no it actually still is running Jessie. I know it is old, but I still think it should be able to play a video.
    – theRedBu
    Oct 25, 2019 at 17:53
  • I suggest you re-flash to the latest Buster - there have been loads of updates to VLC. Why can't you use omxplayer?
    – CoderMike
    Oct 25, 2019 at 18:37
  • I will use omxplayer, but just for others in the house I thought a more traditional GUI player would be preferable. I guess I now have a reason to upgrade the OS, it has been a headless testing area for years and I just moved it to the TV recently. Time to find another microSD card.
    – theRedBu
    Oct 25, 2019 at 18:52
  • Looks like you need to enable the FKMS driver. sudo raspi-config --> Advanced Options --> GL Driver --> GL (Fake KMS). Then reboot.
    – Botspot
    Oct 25, 2019 at 21:56

1 Answer 1

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VLC is getting custom (downstream !) patches for the Raspberry Pi all the time. The foundation pays experienced developers to create and test them. Obviously, without running the latest software you will not see any of it.

VLC uses software decoding without these patches, and will be very slow.

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  • Didn't know that VLC supports hardware acceleration with patches. I have thought only omxplayer was able to use the hardware of the RasPi. Do you have a source/link about this issue from VLC?
    – Ingo
    Oct 26, 2019 at 9:47
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    github.com/RPi-Distro/vlc
    – flakeshake
    Nov 12, 2019 at 11:02

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