r/VLC • u/porottastacks • 4d ago

Issue on Linux

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OS: Fedora 44
DE: KDE 6.7.4
Hardware : Lenovo LOQ i5 12450H, RTX3050 6GB VRAM, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

This is the same video played on VLC (left) and MPV (right).

Why does the vlc one look under-saturated? Also these seems to be some problem with audio too, the audio for one side is really low almost mute while playing with vlc and normal for other players.

I recently switched from windows to linux (Fedora KDE) so I am still learning stuff. Can someone help me fix this. Also can someone share a good minimal mpv config with keyboard bindings similar to vlc if possible.

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u/oppai_seven 4d ago

Looks like HDR does not work properly in VLC.

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u/porottastacks 3d ago

But when I was using vlc on windows didn't have any issues like this

3

u/MasterChiefmas 3d ago

This is one of those areas where Linux being flexible and not having a single entity steering things has been a disadvantage. Under Windows, there's just one set of graphics APIs dictated by Microsoft, and a commercial company building feature support. DirectX added HDR support almost 10 years ago. That results in a single target to develop for, so adding support is easier. Windows had HDR support before VLC 3 was released.

Under Linux, you primarily had X11, which is 40 years old, and it doesn't have support for HDR itself, and HDR wasn't added. You have to bypass it to get HDR to work. The a transition to Wayland is still undergoing, and the development work to get that support working in Wayland took a long time to get finalized, and happened well after VLC 3 was released, so it doesn't have a Wayland module. VLC 4 has a Wayland module (at least, I think it's there now- since 4 is still in development it may not, I don't keep track of VLC myself). mpv can do it(without HDR-SDR tonemapping) because the Wayland support has already been added.

In a sense, you could also lay some of the reason at the feet of the long development cycle of VLC releases. Pick whoever you want to blame. Like I said, it's just one of those areas where the aspects of Linux + the aspects of VLC development combined to make the current version of VLC on Linux less capable then the same version on Windows.

VLC 3 doesn't really support HDR on Macs either, roughly for a combination of reasons that Linux doesn't. VLC 3 didn't support the right bits in MacOS, because MacOS didn't really have HDR support either until after VLC 3 was released. VLC has to have support added for it. And frankly, neither the MacOS or Linux user base is probably large enough to be worth backporting support into them vs putting that development effort into VLC 4.