Rasp. Pi 3 / B - VLC & Smplayer Crashing - Can't play MKVs

Hi There,

I got a Raspberry Pi this weekend and tonight I’ve just finished setting it up with Ubuntu Mate.
Unfortunately, right now it’s not playing any standard MKVs in either VLC (2.2) or Smplayer.
VLC does this - it opens the video file, the time counter starts as if the video is actually playing, but nothing happens. It’s just a standard VLC black box.
Smplayer crashes, gives an error code and gives a huge debug / error log.

I’ve tried it from different external hard drives and different USB sticks. Any help / advice please!

If you chase down the downloads directory, you can see notes for the pi2/3 on setting to use VLC.
I think MKV is a container format, in which case you may need to ascertain which codecs are really involved

I found the page that lists the VLC settings, but those specific options aren’t there in my VLC.
It says to set it to OpenMax IL, but that’s not an option in VLC. I set it to X11 Video Output (XCB) and that’s definitely helped.
I have two MKV video files I’ve been trying to play.

  1. 720p at 1.1GB in file size
  2. 1080p at 7.9GB in size

The 720p will now play…ish. The video will play as normal and the sound is fine, but it’s stuttering and lagging very badly. So it’s not smooth at all. I also can’t seek to any point - if I try to seek to the 20 min mark, the video freezes and the sound becomes very choppy
The 1080p video won’t play at all. It will play a few seconds of the audio but then that’s it.

It’s clearly a bottleneck between the chipset and the USB3 stick I’m trying to use. It’s a 64GB USB3 Sandisk with Android OTG. So it’s got a micro USB connector at the other end.

What are my options? Is anyone willing to spend some time nutting this one out for me please?

I just checked - I have VLC 2.2.2 , which was the installed version
The output module is set to OpenMax IL (under preferences, set to all, video /output module)

Ok, found the setting exactly like you said. But the 720p video is still stuttering and jumping and the same with the audio. It’s definitely not smooth.
I’m running it from another USB3 hard drive dock I have.

1080p video (13GB) is the same - but now the audio is out of sync. It seems to be really, really hit and miss. It seems to depend on what hard drive is in the dock, what dock I’m using and the same for the USB sticks.

Any help debugging this would be great. I’d love to be able to use Ubuntu Mate to plug in my hard drives and play videos without all the issues.

I can only offer a couple of thoughts, and haven’t yet done much in the way of trials with this setup (using OSMC for media playing).

  1. I’ve seen reports that some people have problem using USB3 devices with the (USB2) ports on RPi3
  2. You investigate which codecs are in use when playing your MKV packaged files.
  3. You’ve got the MPEG2 and VC1 licences for your RPi3. There were also some notes concerning this ub-mate about getting hardware decoding for the RPi

Good way to see what codecs your media files are using – a tiny command-line app called ‘mediainfo’. Install, then in a Terminal window just type…

mediainfo <your-media-file-name>

BOOM!