Bug#1057053: Found Workaround; Already (kind of) Fixed Upstream
I am also experiencing this issue on 3.0.21-10 on Debian Trixie and 3.0.21-11 on Debian Forky. Both are AMD64 machines; the Trixie machine has a Renoir APU, while the Forky machine has a Polaris GPU, neither of which support hardware AV1 decoding.
A workaround I found is to go into All Settings, then go to “Input / Codecs”/Video codecs and add dav1d to the preferred decoders list. This forces software decoding for just AV1 while hardware decoding can still be left on for other codecs.
I built the master (v4) and 3.0.x branch of upstream VLC from source, and this issue doesn’t appear. I tracked down the fix to this commit: code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/commit/74de0fda0bec6507ba1e305f7943150140f9dc44
This basically just disables hardware decoding for AV1 on non-Windows platforms. I created a patch with the modifications and built a new package on it, and sure enough, AV1 decoding was working with completely default settings.
I might try and get this fix into the package; however, I want to see if hardware AV1 decoding works on hardware that actually supports it, as this patch would remove a feature for those users for no good reason. If a maintainer has such hardware, I’d like to see that tested. Otherwise, I might just try to find a friend who has the right hardware.
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