Hi, I’m trying to play h.264 coded videos an a fresh system, but it doesn’t work in Clapper, VLC or Gnome Video. Other formats play just fine, like h.265. I was under the impression, Bluefin would ship with multimedia codecs included? Am I’m missing something?
Videos on Youtube play just fine and Firefox shows the following for codec support:
Does anyone of you know what could be wrong or how to troubleshoot the problem?
Thank you.
No answers so far? I tried the steps described in the following documentation, but it didn’t help. Firefox still shows the above screen with almost no hardware decoding and Clapper and VLC still don’t play h.264 encoded videos. Can someone please help? I really want to use Bluefin, but I’m getting frustrated with the “simple to use desktop with the mission of serving a mass audience”. 
If that matters, my video card is: AMD Radeon R9 200 Series (radeonsi, pitcairn, LLVM 17.0.6, DRM 3.57, 6.10.10-100.fc39.x86_64) als listed by Firefox.
In a terminal type vainfo and post output please.
❯ vainfo
Trying display: wayland
libva info: VA-API version 1.22.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_20
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.22 (libva 2.21.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 23.3.6 for AMD Radeon R9 200 Series (radeonsi, pitcairn, LLVM 17.0.6, DRM 3.57, 6.10.10-100.fc39.x86_64)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileMPEG2Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Advanced : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileNone : VAEntrypointVideoProc
What Bluefin version are you using? Just curious since your mesa version 23.3.6
Current mesa is 24.1.7
For reference this is my output under Bazzite.
vainfo
Trying display: wayland
libva info: VA-API version 1.22.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_22
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.22 (libva 2.21.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 24.1.7 for AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (radeonsi, navi31, LLVM 18.1.8, DRM 3.59, 6.11.2-201.fsync.fc40.x86_64)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCMain : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCMain10 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain10 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileJPEGBaseline : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile2 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileAV1Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileAV1Profile0 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileNone : VAEntrypointVideoProc
Bluefin 39 (FROM Fedora Silverblue)
Build: 45d9641
Gnome: 45.6
Kernel: Linux 6.10.10-100.fc39.x86_64
OK your on the version that’s held back. Makes sense now.
You’re definitely missing some codec support, But I don’t know if that’s due to your hardware or what. Have you tried rebase to latest Bluefin and see if problem persist? You can easily rebase back if need to.
Sorry, I don’t know about being on an old version or how to rebase. I was under the impression that Bluefin is auto-updating itself after rebooting. So I’m surprised that my system is not up-to-date. Can you give me a link on how to rebase?
There are different versions of Bluefin.
You can find out your version:
rpm-ostree status
Post output please.
To add to that guide, use the ujust rebase-helper command.
By the way, I think this is hardware related with your 2014 GPU and rebasing to :stable or :latest probably won’t fix that.
ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:gts
Digest: sha256:ba81f343f1be0681f257fa9dd644c6cea5bffad59d2317c61434f51438799169
Version: 39.20241012.0 (2024-10-13T05:44:08Z)
LayeredPackages: doublecmd-gtk mullvad-vpn
LocalPackages: veracrypt-1.26.14-1.x86_64
So rebasing would mean changing to a different channel than “gts”?
My previous Mint installation had no problem playing these videos, but Blufin has? That would be strange.
By now I rebased to latest. But nothing has changed, I still can’t play h.264 encoded videos.
This is the output of rpm-ostree status:
● ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:latest
Digest: sha256:cbd7c0c3e396246359da1e642febb5add6091d03fce143dc71ae4960e8552024
Version: 40.20241014.0 (2024-10-15T04:44:30Z)
LayeredPackages: doublecmd-gtk mullvad-vpn
And this the output of vainfo:
Trying display: wayland
libva info: VA-API version 1.22.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_22
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.22 (libva 2.21.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 24.1.7 for AMD Radeon R9 200 Series (radeonsi, pitcairn, LLVM 18.1.8, DRM 3.57, 6.10.12-200.fc40.x86_64)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileMPEG2Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Advanced : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileNone : VAEntrypointVideoProc
Can you see anything suspicious to further narrow down the problem?
Thank you.
So yes, rebasing to latest didn’t solve the problem. And maybe hardware decoding fails under Bluefin due to my old hardware. But shouldn’t it still work with software decoding? I was able to play those video files under my previous Linux Mint 21 installation with VLC. Maybe hardware decoding didn’t work under Mint as well. Maybe it was all software decoding? The hardware hasn’t changed, only the software. So maybe it’s just a missing codec in Bluefin? How would I troubleshoot missing codecs?
Thank you.
Does VLC spit out an error when you try to play the file?
Nope, just closes the window after one second, same as clapper. And here’s the funny thing: I just loaded three different x.264 encoded videos into Kdenlive (video cutting software), which wouldn’t play in VLC or Clapper. And inside Kdenlive I can preview the videos just fine. So it gotta be some misconfiguration with VLC and Clapper? Or does Kdenlive bring its own codecs that no other app has access to? I’m confused 
Is vlc installed with rpm-ostree or is it flatpak?