@MarkG_108 it's a mistake, my experience sharing reply was for @Giiba (you have the same color image), not to you sorry.

@AppLee : about VLC skin workaround, except if I missed something, this was a proposal that I have made, but if I understood, the same hardware limitations are raised. However, if the Librem 5 / Pinephone can use hardware acceleration, then it is interesting. I hope to follow up the development by UBports team for those projects.

@dobey : it is really strange, both Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 use the same Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 SoC and Adreno 320 GPU. Maybe they can decode small videos and not long (> 20mn), who knows ?

In any case, thank you for having reply and tried to help.

@MarkG_108 After careful consideration, I decided to uninstall Ubuntu Touch. The idea I have of a tablet is among other things to play offline videos without worrying about the format, and surf on Firefox (and incidentally some Webextensions), but with UT it's not possible. I even tried to find a solution developing a VLC version as a .click package, but before I even started, @dobey told me it would be very limited. And @AppLee tells me that hardware acceleration is not setup. So I feel like I have a beautiful but useless device.

I'm not saying this to criticize because from what I understand, UT is not meant to be the Debian-derived Ubuntu that everyone knows, and there are a lot of members here so it's good that all these people are happy.

Strictly speaking, based on this experience, I was convinced not to install this OS if I buy a Librem 5 or a Pinephone for the reasons I mentioned before. But I take my hat off to you for managing to keep an OS that was abandoned by Canonical more than 2 years ago. And I hope to be able to monitor the potential evolution of this OS.

@thilov thank you very much. My objective is to convert VLC Appimage / or snap / or flatpak / or .deb.

Unfortunately, I have tried VLC under libertine, and is almost unusable. And it seems that the hardware acceleration is not available under libertine.

So here, we have many available extensions. My idea is to use a skin to make VLC more user friendly with touch-screens, take the easiest format, and convert into .click app.

But, as I am not a developer, I think without an easy to convert tool (meaning, if I have to code a lot), I have not a lot of possibility to succeed.

Hello, I think the title says everything.

I am not a developer. However, I remember how it was easy to convert a .deb file into an .Appimage following some step by step tutorials.

But with click packages, I feel I just can't. I think I just don't have the level to make it work. Or maybe I missed a very easy tutorial somewhere. Appimage has this advantage that even non developers can almost build their app.

So please, do you know if this tutorial exist ? Can we convert a snap or .deb or any other package to click ? My target is to do an app (not a web app).

Please, don't just forward me the UBports documentation : you can easily imagine I have already read pages of it.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

@MarkG_108 Hello, thank you for your advise. I have tried this way : open UTmedia > click on Select File > Select File Manager > click on the file you want to play and validate.
The file launch, but there is huge buffering. I imagine it is due to missing hardware acceleration. I have tried to install gstreamer plugins, without changes.

@dobey it is possible, I don't remember very well if I install the gstreamer codecs plugins or not. But you seems to be sure, so I trust you. I would be happy if UT allows to install those plugins too.

@AppLee yes, and about VLC I have asked this question a few days ago, but the answer was that hardware acceleration is not supported by Libertine, therefore it can be limited.

@AppLee thank you for your explanation. On my side, my device is a Nexus 7, so this is why playing videos is very important for me (I don't call / use GPS / etc. just web browsing and watching videos with it).

I understand the codecs are not free, but how did Debian do with their player (GNOME Videos = Totem) ? As far as I know, I am not sure they pay for codecs. Maybe we can port their player to Ubuntu Touch, do you think it is an easy task (I ask that because I am not a developer) ?

@AppLee I understand all what you say, but please, understand that the priority sometimes shall be done on basic features.

What I call basic feature is call, camera (picture/video), movie/audio player, and browser. They shall be ready almost at start.

Then you have the basic features which may not work at day 1 such as bluetooth, GPS, etc. but shall be important too.

Rather than focusing on one feature or another, I think we already need to get the basic features working. After the new features are a very good thing, but they should not take priority over the essential things.

If we just find it normal that Video player only works on certain videos (for 2 years), we risk saying "it works, pretty well, the rest we'll see later" and we leave it aside for another 2 years ?

It would be better and more logical to prioritize this feature, and please, no offense don't take it personal, somebody have to raise this issue.

@dobey thank you for your reply. I confirm the unreadable files are :

• mp4 - Quicktime - H.264
• mkv - Matroska - H.264

And like @Giiba , I start to become pessimistic about watching any movie on UT (media player can't read those formats, while Uplayer is buggy and does not launch most of the time). It's a basic feature.

Hello, I want to remind this topic as I face the same issue (no possibility to read mkv and some other formats). Please, is there any available codec plugin that I can install, even from terminal ?

@Giiba has re-encoded his video, but I think you can easily understand why we cannot do it every time (for instance many videos > 1GB take too much time to re-encode). Thank you very much!