vlc won't start

English Multimedia
#1

I have a link to vlc in my start panel. (Start panel means I’m using KDE) When I click it I see the icon bounce but then goes away. So I opened Konsole and got the following:

bart@UNIVAC:~> vlc
VLC media player 2.2.6 Umbrella (revision 2.2.6-0-g1aae78981c)
[00007f023004ac28] xml xml reader error: XML parser error (line 1) : Document is empty

[0000558f189d9388] skins2 interface error: no skins found : exiting
bart@UNIVAC:~>

In ~/.local/share/vlc/skins2/ are two files:

bart@UNIVAC:~/.local/share/vlc/skins2> ls -l
total 236
-rw-r--r-- 1 bart users  56839 Aug 17  2016 dno_black.vlt
-rw-r--r-- 1 bart users 184320 Aug 17  2016 dno_black.vlt.uncompressed
bart@UNIVAC:~/.local/share/vlc/skins2>

vlc used to work. I have no idea what I did to cause this problem, I use multimedia infrequently. Did they change the location of the skins? Any idea why vlc won’t recognize those files?
Bart

#2

Try to remove them, e.g. rename the whole folder.
Apparently they are broken or in a format that the current vlc version doesn’t support.

Did they change the location of the skins?

No.
If they did, VLC would actually start (with the default skin) because it wouldn’t find the skin.

Any idea why vlc won’t recognize those files?

The error message says “Document is empty”.
So either the file itself is broken, or vlc cannot unextract the archive for some reason.

Likely reason:


* Fre Mai 26 2017 dimstar@opensuse.org
- Update to version 2.2.6:
...
- Drop vlc-2.1.5-fix-skins2-default-skin-creation.patch: this
 should really not be required anymore.

I already re-added/fixed this patch once because vlc could not read its skins, and now they removed it… :X
Although, that should only affect the included default skin. It should make no change to your custom one, but of course the fallback to the default one won’t work.

You could try to unextract the .vlt file yourself and repack it. It’s just a gzip compressed tar archive.
Be sure to pass the “–format=ustar” option to tar though, i.e. something like:

tar --format=ustar -gcf dno_black.vlt *foldername*
#3

PS: Of course you could also switch back to the standard GUI.
As vlc doesn’t start and you cannot reach its settings therefore, run it with the “–ignore-config” or “–reset-config” options, or just delete ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc

If you don’t want to lose your settings, you could change that file accordingly with a text editor.
Remove or comment the line:

intf=skins2,any

(or similar)

#4

I renamed ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc and vlc will now start! I’ll fuss with the skins stuff at another time. Thanks!