I am experiencing an issue with VLC, where it crops 3/4 of the video and displays the remaining quarter in the upper left corner, leaving the rest of the window black.
The problem applies to window mode, maximized and full screen.
Putting output to “OpenGL video output (experimental)” appears to work, but playback is poor.
VLC 3 beta works better, but beta issues apply.
Kaffeine properly plays all videos, so it’s clearly a VLC/Plasma 5.4 issue.
I have now reverted back to Plasma 5.3.2, where everything works.
My update approach to Plasma 5.4 was to switch system packages to the Frameworks5 and Qt5 repos in YaST2.
I haven’t seen this issue reported anywhere and am wondering if others are experiencing it?
It is an incompatibility of the VLC packages with Qt 5.5, and unrelated to Plasma 5.4. The VLC packages are built with Qt 5.4, maybe that’s the reason, or maybe Qt 5.5 even has a bug regarding this…
Switching back Qt to the 5.4.2 version from the Update repo fixes the issue (I just tried that), but you will have to downgrade Plasma and KF5 to 5.3.2/5.11 too (or ignore the dependencies, but then it probably won’t work at all).
I guess I’ll try building VLC against Qt 5.5 and see if it works then…
Btw, switching to fullscreen via double-click works fine again too after downgrading to Qt 5.4.2. With 5.5 double-clicking on the VLC window didn’t have any effect here.
PS: A workaround is to use the skinnable interface.
You’d have to unpack the default skin first though (/usr/share/vlc/skins2/default.vlt, for some reason VLC cannot load it, and the WinAMP skin doesn’t work either), or download a new one.
This indicates even more that the problem lies in the Qt interface, not in the player itself…
So this seems to be a general incompatibility of VLC with Qt 5.5, or a bug in Qt 5.5.
I guess I’ll file a bug report in the next days.
But at least I was able to fix the problem with the default skin. This should work again in a few days in the “official” packages…
And as I wrote, if you configure VLC to use a skin (Settings->Interface), the problem disappears.
