GNOME video playback components

Desktop
1

I’ve stripped GNOME down to about 345MB of RAM at boot time. One problem I’m having is VLC starts and plays videos but there is more pixilation/tearing than in default GNOME. Anyone know which GNOME components assist with video playback?

Thanks.

    0[|        0.7%]   1[         0.0%] Tasks: 39, 68 thr, 72 kthr; 1 running
  Mem[|||347M/3.82G] Swp[      0K/975M] System: Linux 6.1.0-22-amd64 [x86_64] 
  Uptime: 00:02:02                      Load average: 0.10 0.10 0.04 

  [Main] [I/O]
    MEM%  CPU%   RES▽Command
     4.8   0.7  187M /usr/bin/gnome-shell
     1.5   0.0 58556 /lib/systemd/systemd-journald
     1.2   0.0 50104 /usr/libexec/gnome-terminal-server
     0.7   0.0 28652 /usr/bin/gjs /usr/share/gnome-shell/org.gnome.Shell.Notific
     0.5   0.0 21672 /usr/sbin/NetworkManager --no-daemon
     0.5   0.0 19756 /usr/libexec/gnome-session-binary --systemd-service --sessi
     0.5   0.0 18416 /usr/bin/wireplumber
     0.5   0.0 18272 /usr/libexec/gnome-session-binary
     0.4   0.0 16824 /usr/libexec/udisks2/udisksd
     0.3   0.0 13384 /usr/libexec/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor
     0.3   0.0 12436 /sbin/init
     0.3   0.0 11768 /usr/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher --launch-immediately
     0.3   0.0 11756 /usr/bin/pipewire
     0.3   0.0 11544 gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-password]
     0.3   0.0 11324 /lib/systemd/systemd --user
     0.3   0.0 11120 /usr/sbin/gdm3
2

GStreamer – which VLC doesn’t use – and pipewire.

You’re not going to find much help for VLC here because it’s not GNOME software. You’ll want to check with the VLC community instead.

1 Like
3

Thanks Michael :grinning:

I’ll see if I can find a VLC forum. Good news is I have pipewire running:

     0.3   0.0 11756 /usr/bin/pipewire
4

Hi Michael :grinning:

I just noticed you were a “Release Team Member”. Debian has an app, tasksel, which allows users to install different desktop environments including the default GNOME. It also has a GNOME Flashback with no wayland support. As a “Release Team Member” do you know if there are GNOME packages which install GNOME with wayland support and a minimal set of apps, no games/browsser/office/etc.

Thanks :grinning:

5

Hi, no, you can’t use GNOME to install GNOME. That’s up to Debian’s installer.

6

Sorry Michael. I was a bit confusing with that.

The Debian tasksel program installs one or more packages from GNOME in order to install GNOME on top of Debian base (command line). Debian’s KDE web page lists a package, kde-plasma-desktop, which it describes as “Minimal desktop.” The page:

https://wiki.debian.org/KDE

I’ve used “sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop” to install a minimal version of KDE on a Debian base install. Do you know if GNOME has a package similar to this which only includes a few critical apps like terminal?

7

I’ve probably destroyed about 50 GNOME VMs trying to remove non-critical components. It appears a version I was cloning had something amiss and after I used tasksel to install GNOME onto a base Debian VM the VLC issue did not appear after running my app/service removal scripts.

8

This is a question best asked on a Debian user support forum. GNOME is not responsible for how downstream distributors package the project’s components.