No playback on Video Player on Linux

General Discussion
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Heyo, I’m not sure how long this has been an issue on Linux for, but it would seem that there aren’t any FFMPEG executables for Linux, and that may be causing that issue.

I’ll update this post if I find some logs to give proof that it doesn’t work.

My current distribution is Kubuntu 22.04.1 LTS (Ubuntu but using the KDE plasma desktop environment).

Update (9/7/22 8:33pm): Upon launching the game, I was met with the AntiCheat error… So I think either Proton broke or something else happened… I’m currently investigating.

1 Like
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  • I can vouch for this problem as well. I’ve experienced this problem on both on Kubuntu 22.04 and the Steam Deck. I thought I saw a fix for this in older patch notes, but there obviously still seems to be some issues. Just know you’re not the only one.
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I just launched the game on my laptop that runs Debain 11, and it works! I dunno how, but I’ll figure it out in a bit.

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Try changing the photon version to the latest one in the steam game properties

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This is an issue with certain players, I’m not sure but depending on which method of video playback they use they sometimes don’t function properly

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Can confirm that this still happens in the newest vr chat build, using steam deck beta os and tested with multiple proton versions, experimental, 7, GE7-54
I’m getting a black screen from videos with no audio.

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Any updates on this situation? Any fixes or workarounds?
In my case (on Mint btw), I can use video players to stream audio, but they return an error when trying to play video. This is incredibly frustrating because I can’t even participate in most club events, which are half the reason I’m on this game.

Update: I’ve installed all the related codecs and libraries I could think of, disabled vsync and set the avpro launch option but nothing has changed. I’m going to keep researching and trying things until it works.

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Do other games use media foundation? I wonder if VRChat just happens to be using something uncommon.

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Alright, after two days of messing around I’m beginning to understand what’s up. All info for this issue is scattered around github and protondb etc. so I’m gonna post all relevant stuff I’ve gathered here for accessibility. This is my experience on Mint, but should be relatively universal advice for popular distros.

  • VRC no longer uses youtube-dl, they now use the AVPro player which needs to be emulated alongside the game. Add
    ‘gamemoderun %command% --enable-avpro-in-proton’ to your Steam launch options. (also may need ‘–disable-hw-video-decoding’ which diverts decoding to the software, but not always necessary and can cause other bugs.)
  • The latest Proton-GE (make sure you get it from the official github!) is recommended as it includes fixes that can resolve player issues. (Videos didn’t work until I installed it.)
  • Make sure you have the latest wine (9.0+) AND latest winetricks installed. Use the winetricks dll installer to get all the DirectX/DirectShow/Windows Media Framework/Virtual C++ and related video/audio libraries. Use winecfg to set their priority to native->builtin. (I don’t know how much of this is necessary. This is just to ensure maximum compatibility.)
  • Make sure you have all the GStreamer, FFMpeg and LibAV libraries including RTSP for native compatibility.
    At this point, AVPro players should seamlessly load Youtube videos. I’m still unable to load RTSP streams (VRCDN etc.) but am scouring for info that can help with patching it.

Hope this helps for now! I’ll be back if I figure anything else out on my own.

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You sure on that? I haven’t checked recently but the way it used to work is that yt-dlp is used to get a direct video link, specifically to a combined mp4 file with audio and video. Due to regular changes in websites in general the yt-dlp.exe that VRChat hands out is checked at least once every session.

yt-dlp can suggest a change to the URL given to avpro, is my understanding of how they work together.

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My bad, you’re right. I set up a log last night and saw yt-dlp being used. I guess the major difference is how yt-dl is implemented in the mix now(?) I’m just going off random info from threads…
But!.. While reading over this github thread again
(VRChat (438100) · Issue #1199 · ValveSoftware/Proton · GitHub) I literally just noticed something I must have glossed over a few times. There is a legit well-maintained fork of Proton-GE with an RTSP patch. (Releases · SpookySkeletons/proton-ge-rtsp · GitHub)
Also, it looks like using MPEG-TS instead is the solution. Hopefully, club owners/MCs will pick up on this and everyone will be able to enjoy music events equally in the near future!