Hello, palinuro here.
I have recently noticed that VLC is no longer able to start its graphical interface after the latest updates.
I tried to recompile it against some libraries that were recently updated, and tried to figure out what’s wrong with vlc and i found some possible workarounds i would like to share with you
first of all, this is the output message when you start vlc manually from terminal:
┌─[palinuro@parrot]─[~]
└──╼ $vlc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/vlc.profile
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-common.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-devel.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-passwdmgr.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-programs.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/whitelist-var-common.inc
Parent pid 7166, child pid 7167
Child process initialized in 92.24 ms
VLC media player 3.0.1 Vetinari (revision 3.0.1-0-gec0f700fcc)
[0000556fae7e4750] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[0000556fae8c36e0] `skins2 interface error: cannot instantiate dialogs provider`
[0000556fae7df3a0] main playlist: playlist is empty
[0000556fae8c36e0] [cli] lua interface: Listening on host "*console".
VLC media player 3.0.1 Vetinari
Command Line Interface initialized. Type `help' for help.
>
as you can see the real error message there is
`skins2 interface error: cannot instantiate dialogs provider`
a little workaround i found was to start vlc with the following parameters
vlc --reset-config --reset-plugins-cache
i’ll try other better solutions asap
stay tuned