VLC media player not working: No Interface

Question

VLC media playes used to work well without any problem on ubuntu 18.04 now its showing these errors:

VLC media player 3.0.1 Vetinari (revision 3.0.1-0-gec0f700fcc)
[000055c1a15f6570] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[000055c1a16d23c0] skins2 interface error: cannot instantiate dialogs provider
[000055c1a15fa4e0] main playlist: playlist is empty
[000055c1a16d23c0] [cli] lua interface: Listening on host "*console".
VLC media player 3.0.1 Vetinari
Command Line Interface initialized. Type `help' for help.

How can I solve this problem? I have tried installing and reinstalling it several times but still doesn't work.

Answer 1

TL;DR: sudo apt install --reinstall libqt5svg5

On Ubuntu 18.04 fresh install I also got this issue. It actually seems to come from some graphical libraries not being installed properly. Here's my debug story.

First run in verbose with vlc -v as suggested by @kissste:

vlc -v
VLC media player 3.0.3 Vetinari (revision 3.0.3-1-0-gc2bb759264)
main libvlc warning: cannot load module `/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/vlc/plugins/gui/libqt_plugin.so'
(libQt5Svg.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
skins2 interface error: cannot instantiate dialogs provider
...
> Shutting down.
[000055cbfba501b0] [cli] lua interface: Requested shutdown.

So in my case it's complaining about libQt5Svg.so.5 not being found. Let's check from which package it comes using dpkg -S:

dpkg -S libQt5Svg.so.5
libqt5svg5:amd64: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Svg.so.5.9.5
libqt5svg5:amd64: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Svg.so.5.9
libqt5svg5:amd64: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Svg.so.5

We have the package name libqt5svg5 and we also have the path where the file should be, let's verify it's indeed not there with ls:

ls -l /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Svg.so.5*
ls: cannot access '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Svg.so.5*': No such file or directory

The funny thing is I just installed vlc so the package manager should have pulled the libqt5svg5 dependency itself. I'm curious so let's very if it's installed with dpkg --list:

dpkg --list libqt5svg5
||/ Name                  Version         Architecture    Description
+++-=====================-===============-===============-================
ii  libqt5svg5:amd64      5.9.5-0ubuntu1  amd64           Qt 5 SVG module

So yes it's installed, but probably broken then so we need to reinstall it:

 sudo apt install --reinstall libqt5svg5

Running vlc again with -v flag the warning message is gone and I can see the vlc UI.

Answer 2

1. Run vlc with more details:

   vlc -v

   If libGL.so.1 is missing then continue,

2. Find location of libGL.so.1

   find / -name libGL.so.1

3. Add path to libGL.so.1 to vlc.conf (example: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/)

   sudo vi /etc/ld.so.conf.d/vlc.conf

4. and, lastly run:

   sudo ldconfig -v