Play a video - possible?

Hardware Librem 5
1

I’m wondering if it’s possible to play a video on the librem5?

I’ve tried several apps, but none can play a simple video file.

It doesn’t seem documented on

or another page, which I find odd, because I would think this is extremely basic common request.

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2

I play videos all the time on my Librem 5. I prefer VLC for the video player. It works really well.

3

Thanks. I just got vlc installed, by searching for incompatible apps and installing that.

It seems every ‘compatible’ video player in the store doesn’t play the videos.

i had tried clapper, uplayer, hbud, celluloid and those all failed.

At least there is one that can play videos. Cool.

2 Likes
4

Is there more info on why it failed? Was there an error shown? What file did you try to play? Codec, file extension, …

Clapper works fine for me.

5

mp4 file

(+) Video --vid=1 () (h264 640x360 23.976fps)
(+) Audio --aid=1 () (aac 2ch 44100Hz)
AO: [sndio] 44100Hz stereo 2ch s16
VO: [gpu] 640x360 yuv420p
AV: 00:00:18 / 00:57:51 (1%) A-V: -0.000

clapper opens the file, but does nothing. When you press play, it just stays as a black screen.

hbud does pretty much the same, doesn’t move past 0:00:00 play pause buttons toggle, but it doesn’t even start to play the video.

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6

these pkgs are installed

ii  gstreamer1.0-clutter-3.0:arm64        3.0.27-2                                 arm64        Clutter PLugin for GStreamer 1.0
ii  gstreamer1.0-gl:arm64                 1.18.4-2+deb11u1                         arm64        GStreamer plugins for GL
ii  gstreamer1.0-gtk3:arm64               1.18.4-2+deb11u2                         arm64        GStreamer plugin for GTK+3
ii  gstreamer1.0-libav:arm64              1.18.4-3                                 arm64        ffmpeg plugin for GStreamer
ii  gstreamer1.0-nice:arm64               0.1.16-1                                 arm64        ICE library (GStreamer plugin)
ii  gstreamer1.0-packagekit               1.2.5-1~pureos2                          arm64        GStreamer plugin to install codecs using PackageKit
ii  gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad:arm64        1.18.4-3pureos1                          arm64        GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set
ii  gstreamer1.0-plugins-base:arm64       1.18.4-2+deb11u1                         arm64        GStreamer plugins from the "base" set
ii  gstreamer1.0-plugins-good:arm64       1.18.4-2+deb11u2                         arm64        GStreamer plugins from the "good" set
ii  gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly:arm64       1.18.4-2                                 arm64        GStreamer plugins from the "ugly" set
ii  gstreamer1.0-x:arm64                  1.18.4-2+deb11u1                         arm64        GStreamer plugins for X11 and Pango
ii  libgstreamer1.0-0:arm64               1.18.4-2.1                               arm64        Core GStreamer libraries and elements
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7

I use Clapper to play files that are embedded in websites (in Giara, the Reddit client most of the time), and VLC for anything else (although VLC will happily play embedded video’s too).
At first I tried playing video files off of my sd-card with Clapper, but that did not work for one reason or another.
I do not recall having to install any plugins to make things work.

Only exception to all this: DRM content. That does not play in either (any) app.

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8

Usually I watch videos using Firefox ESR. I already tried all of the Flatpaks from the PureOS Store, but none of them seem to be able to load any common video file container format and codec.

9

:disappointed_relieved:

:disappointed_relieved:

:disappointed_relieved:

:disappointed_relieved:

:disappointed_relieved:

10

Why so sad?!

1 Like
11

The file info seems normal. Just to check that it’s not about one bad file (from your question it seems like you’ve only tested one file - maybe it’s more): can you play any other kind of videos - like .avi, .mkv or from net (like youtube)? And is this file on the eMMC (/home), SD card, USB-stick or from a network source (wifi, mobile or wired)? If you can test some of those, that would rule out some reasons (like a weird bad file, bad file system/partition/disk, or long download of an online video source).

12

It’s ok, I think I’m sorted. At least I got lots of useful feedback from you all. Thanks! I’ll use vlc when all else fails, but at least there are quite a few options, and some of them work.

Thanks!

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