Attention

Qubes OS 4.2 has reached end of life - it is no longer supported and thus will no longer receive security updates, bug fixes, or new features. We recommend to perform an in-place upgrade or perform a clean installation of Qubes 4.3! The documentation of version 4.2 will also not receive any new updates, unless bug fixes. Its state is thus archived.

Media troubleshooting

Can’t play media videos in a VM due to missing codecs

If you’re having trouble playing a video file in a qube, you’re probably missing the required codecs. The easiest way to resolve this is to install VLC Media Player and use that to play your video files. You can do this in multiple different template distros by following the instructions here.

Video lagging

Playing videos may cause lags since software decoding uses a lot of CPU.

Depending on your video player, there are some settings that may smoothen video plays:

  • If using VLC media player, go to Tools–> Preferences –> Video –> Output. By default, the Output is set to “Automatic”. Go through the list and try out other output options to see if any makes videos run smoother.

  • If using mpv media player, you may be able to improve performance by entering mpv --profile=sw-fast --vo=x11 in a terminal.

  • For video lags when playing videos from a browser, disable hardware acceleration in the browser. If the problem arises when watching streams, it may be smoother to use streamlink to view streams in mpv instead of using the browser.