Recently after upgrading to Fedora 30 and installing VLC Media Player, I started experiencing crashes (segmentation fault) since the first attempt to launch.
As you can see, there’s a segfault from
0x00007ffff7fdc19a in do_lookup_x () from /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
This means nothing to me, but I’ll tell you how I fixed it. Search around the web and lots of people will recommend updating or downgrading Mesa drivers, reinstalling VLC, rebooting, etc. There’s even a bug report with the same symptom here. None of this worked for me. Looking through the packages on my system though, I did find a likely candidate to try updating / downgrading - ffmpeg-libs.
ffmpeg fun
After removing this package, VLC worked great, but I couldn’t open any h264 encoded videos - so kinda useless. I reinstalled ffmpeg, and tried ffmpeg from the command line. I got this odd message.
ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: libavdevice.so.58: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Installing a ton of random libraries
We know VLC uses ffmpeg, so if there’s an issue with ffmpeg, that is likely to cause an issue with VLC. I started trying to fix ffmpeg. So I ran dnf install libavdevice. VLC still didn’t work, and I was given a similar error to above when running ffmpeg. I repeated this process a few more times until I was left with a working VLC and working ffmpeg.
➜ ~ sudo dnf history
ID | Command line | Date and time | Action(s) | Altered
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
81 | install zvbi | 2019-09-16 21:46 | Install | 1
80 | install libmfx | 2019-09-16 21:44 | Install | 1
79 | install libass | 2019-09-16 21:44 | Install | 1
78 | install libavdevice | 2019-09-16 21:43 | Install | 1
I can’t explain why this worked at this time, but I hope someone finds this and it helps them out.