VLC - flaky on 22.04

Ubuntu
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OK - kinda hate the look of VLC 3.0.16 “Vetinari” (great name - ode to Terry Pratchett) - it still looks about 10+ years old - the version in Fedora 36 seems more “modern” anyway, and follows the Adwaita theming closely (on Ubuntu it completely ignores it)…

Not only that - despite updating Ubuntu earlier this week, and rebooting, VLC 3.0.16 is FLAKY, like a corn based breakfast cereal!

So - I decide to remove, and purge VLC (was unable to figure out if it was a snap or apt/deb package - didn’t spend much time there). Normally, I prefer not to enable PPA’s, as I’ve had Ubuntu come “unstuck” in the past due to shonky PPA’s - but I took a risk and installed the VLC PPA (I’m also using A PPA to get the latest InkScape):

sudo apt purge vlc && sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/master-daily && sudo apt update && apt install vlc

But now what I’ve ended up with is the other extreme, a crapola modern interface that looks tablet or smartphone oriented, but not clickety-click-click desktop computer friendly… I mean, in full screen mode when watching a video or a stream, there’s NO controls, no pause, no volume, no FWD or REV, NADA! And it seems just as flaky as the “old” 1990’s UI version…

I stopped using VLC to watch downloaded videos anyway - I use MPV - I like the way MPV ALWAYS resizes maintaining the aspect ration of the content being played… I only use VLC for watching TV streaming content from TVHeadend running on my RPi 3…

Heck I’d use MPV for watching TVHeadend, 'cause it’s quite capable of running multiple instances and not giving a stuff, but it’s not as good as VLC at changing channels on the incoming stream of free to air broadcasts from TVHeadend on the Pi…

This CLI fires up the TV Stream on my Pi…

Yeah - bugger it - reckon I’ll do without VLC period, MPV is a better product IMHO…

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Your story both confuses and concerns me.
VLC is not some flaky new guy, it is a reasonably reputable package with a long history. Surely they hsve learnt how to bombproof it by now?
I wonder just how well Ubuntu keeps it releases to sets of compatable versions of packages?
I also wonder whether, because you are always wanting ‘latest’ versions, you might be better off with rolling Ubuntu. @berninghausen seems to have had a good experience with rolling Rhino.
Maybe if you let the package updates roll instead of bring always chasing versions, you might have a better experience.

I agree with you on disliking installs outside the package system. I am presently having that issue with rustc and cargo. Rust evolves so rapidly that slow release distros like Debian cant keep up, so people use a thing called rustup which installs the current rustc in your home directory. Then you find it is not compatable with Debian’s libraries. So I have to go to something like Void, to keep the libraries uo to date so rust can function.

So , what I am saying is, maybe some of you issues would disappear if you kept everthing bleeding edge by using rolling Ubuntu?

Dont panic, its only a suggestion.

Cheers
Neville

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:smiley:
I solved my VideoLan issue by removing it and using MPV instead… it’s pretty much a graphical frontend to ffmpeg… And I always have ffmpeg installed, I use it in a few scripts, and because I’m slowly upgrading my music collection to lossless (FLAC) - I occasionally need to break out ffmpeg via CLI if I need to plonk an album on a thumb drive to play in the car, which will only play mp3…
I agree with you :

Back when Linux was my secondary, and mostly server o/s (I’ve always had a few Linux and UNIX servers at home), and Windows was my primary desktop OS, VLC was my goto there too! I’ll never forget (or forgive) how Microsoft Movie Player let an activeX virus, hidden in a payload in a DIVX AVI *file, infect my computer! That was the early noughties… Used VLC ever since… For a time (before @Abishek wrote about Sayonara) it was my primary audio player on Linux too…

Yeah - yeah - I know - Linux can still be vulnerable, especially for things like Ransomware - but - it is WAY less vulnerable than stuff from Redmond WA. WE should never be SMUG or complacent…

* I’ve still got that DIVX file - “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” I’d love to see it try and infect a Linux computer with its shonky script-kiddie ActiveX attack vector :
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