Arch Linux User Repository

I have a possible workaround for the Qt 5.14.1 "no video" issue that I could use some help testing. See the patch here: https://github.com/mhitchens/plex-media-player/commit/f3cf02d99b3f3ded23639bd5bede0649cca3a03d

The "--disable-viz-display-compositor" Qt flag appears to restore the previous way the compositor threading worked. I'm very happy to be back to a system without a held-back Qt, so I'm hoping this helps others.

While this playback issue exists, I found an alternative to the AUR version of PMP: https://knapsu.eu/plex/

The easiest solution right now is to just use the AppImage https://knapsu.eu/plex/

@polyzen: Yes, that's true. I mentioned that further down in the comments. The problem is

1. That downgrading is a temporary solution, on one PC I already stumbled over problems with the downgrade, because another package demands QT-5.14
2. That plex officially only supports QT-5.9...

In my eyes this package is broken as long as one needs to come here and look for workarounds to get the plex player running.

Just thought about if there shouldn't be a 'broken' flag for AUR packages? To indicate a defect state, 'out-of-date' seems to be very specific. Does anyone know about an official statement to such a request?

@polyzen Thank you for that info. I can confirm PMP working beautifully with QT 5.13.2.

There are no issues when built with the QT 5.13.2 packages. There has only been one release since then, and no security concerns I'm aware of.

You can easily downgrade with this, and it also prompts to add the downgraded packages to IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf for you.

Having this issue even with the most current version proofs you wrong @ombre. And have a look for the last comment from @Kage-Yami, his findings might explain the black screen issue you are referring to.

Integrating the qt5-595 packages is the only sane way of handling this (not to say the nicest solution, because it also brings all bugs that old QT versions contain... black screen anyone?). But at least we can file bugs for that.

I believe the issue would be more obvious if the qt.patch would not have been integrated in the first place, because that actually results in a runtime-broken compilation, at least for >=qt-5.14.

@ombre I'm surprised that the qt-595 packages in the AUR don't build (haven't tried it myself though), given they're by @cian1500ww from this year... You can have AUR packages inside depends for other AUR packages - it's up the the end user to ensure they have those packages installed or available in a configured repository (this is pretty common, and is exactly what plex-media-player-git does).

As for the black-screen issues, I tracked it down to only happening with HEVC videos; MP4, Theora, VP9, and x264 videos all play fine for me. While the reported colour is different, it might be this issue: https://github.com/plexinc/plex-media-player/issues/929

EDIT: Interesting - so downgrading mesa-vdpau to 19.1.1 (it just so happened to be the oldest one I had locally) fixes the black-screen issue. Time to find it exactly which version it breaks in.

EDIT 2: So 19.1.* and 19.2.0 versions of mesa-vdpau seems to work for me. Other versions of 19.2.* crash PMP outright, and 19.3.* exhibit the black-screen issue.

EDIT 3: I suppose I should mention I'm running an AMD CPU + AMD Discrete GPU.

I just unflagged the Package as "out-of-date" since this is not the case. I'm aware that there are Issues with this package and Asator and I are looking into it to find a solution. As there are reports of black screens with the qt-5.9.5 packages and the PKGBUILD with those packages does not really work, since makepkg installs dependencies with pacman so they can't be aur packages this isn't a way to go we have to find an other solution to fix this issues.