Problems with VLC and MPlayer

[microlinux]

Hi,

I got a new workstation recently, in replacement of my old hardware, and I decided to move from Rocky Linux 8 with KDE from EPEL to Rocky Linux 9 with KDE from EPEL.

Things like video playback worked perfectly under Rocky Linux 8, but it looks like multimedia applications like VLC and MPlayer have to be potty-trained again.

I should state beforehand that I’ve been a RHEL clone user since the good old days of CentOS 4.x, so the usual suspects among the repositories are already configured:

$ dnf repolist
id du dépôt                                               nom du dépôt
anydesk                                                   AnyDesk
appstream                                                 AppStream
baseos                                                    BaseOS
crb                                                       CRB
docker                                                    Docker
eid-archive                                               EID Archive
elrepo                                                    ELRepo
epel                                                      EPEL
extras                                                    Extras
google-chrome                                             google-chrome
hashicorp                                                 Hashicorp
lynis                                                     Lynis
microlinux                                                Microlinux
openh264                                                  OpenH264
rpmfusion-free                                            RPM Fusion
rpmfusion-nonfree                                         RPM Fusion Nonfree
rpmfusion-tainted                                         RPM Fusion Tainted

Here’s what reading a video looks like with MPlayer:

$ mplayer out.mp4 
mplayer: error while loading shared libraries: libjack.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

My VLC installation is supposed to have all the codec-related stuff installed:

$ rpm -qa | grep vlc
vlc-libs-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-plugins-base-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-plugin-lua-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-cli-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-plugin-pipewire-3-1.el9.x86_64
vlc-plugin-pulseaudio-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-plugins-video-out-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-gui-qt-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-plugins-freeworld-3.0.20-1.el9.x86_64
vlc-plugin-visualization-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-plugin-notify-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-plugin-gnome-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64
vlc-plugin-ffmpeg-3.0.21-9.el9.x86_64

Curiously enough, most of my MP4 videos can’t be read, with the odd “missing h264 codec” message appearing. And if a video is read, subtitles are missing. Even if the corresponding subtitle file is loaded, no subtitles show up in OSD.

Any suggestions ?

[microlinux]

I’ll answer this myself, since I made some progress. VLC seems to work fine now. I hadn’t seen the vlc-plugins-all metapackage, so I installed this which in turn fetched some missing stuff.

Now the only remaining video playback problem is with MPlayer. Looks like there’s a missing dependency that the packager’s overlooked. But which one ?

[microlinux]

OK, found the culprit. The missing package was jack-audio-connection-kit. Looks like the MPlayer package maintainer forgot to mention it in the runtime dependencies.

Video playback works fine now.