VLC starts only as root

Hello,
I have been trying for a long time to use VLC in Clear Linux. Now, although most media files (actually all the media files I use to play with VLC) won’t play because their codec isn’t available, I decided to compile it from sources. I am not a super-expert user, and compiling VLC was a nightmare: missing dependencies, bugged dependencies, missing environmental variables, messy static/dynamic library linking and so on… Finally I was able to get it working, until today it didn’t start up… I wanted to give a shot again to the swupd version, to see if anything changed, but with big surprise that won’t start too, and it crashes without any error message! I was able to run it as root via the “vlc-wrapper”. Does anyone have any suggestion? Or any way I could reinstall it from sources without wasting half a week? Thanks!

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Have you tried installing the vlc flatpak? That should have the codecs you seek without the need to run as root.

https://clearlinux.org/software/flathub/vlc

I ended up compiling it by hand. I don’t like the concept of flatpack: 2GB of runtime to run a 50MB program in a isolated environment: thanks but no thanks, luckily I don’t have to concern about such terrible security issues. Thanks anyway for the suggestion :slight_smile:

I would definitely try and script that install to make it as painless as possible (though I think it will always be painful). When the dependency libraries change you may need to rebuild. This seems like a different problem though. What error(s) do you see if you try to run vlc in a terminal?

I think there is some conflict between compiled VLC and bundle VLC. Now that everything works I really dont want start messing around with the system. A note though is that it won’t play MP3/MP4 files with nouveau drivers, just with Nvidia. Probably having compiled it with VDPAU causes this problem…