Haruna doesn't show any video

Riaru · January 2, 2026, 9:37am

Hi there,

I’ve been at it for a couple of weeks trying to get haruna to play one of my clips but it simply doesn’t want to show the video. If I open the clip in Dolphin using haruna it just shows a black screen without audio. Haruna is installed using dnf. I’ve tried using flatpak but it doesn’t seem to change anything. I also have MPV installed using dnf as well.

If I then proceed to open a file using haruna, it will show an error about missing codecs. But using this method, audio seems to play but the video just doesnt seem to play. I’ve tried just about every suggestion I could find.

getting multimedia
swapping ffmpeg to the full version
some other codec packages.

Any help would be appreciated.

skyfishgoo · January 2, 2026, 12:21pm

do you have VLC installed?

VLC comes with a lot of proprietary codecs that fedora does not package out of the box.

Riaru · January 2, 2026, 10:47pm

Yes I do. Installed it using dnf as well. I’ve tried it using flatpak as well.

I remember Haruna working when I fresh installed Fedora. I’m not sure what I did or which update broke it but i’ve never been able to fix it since

skyfishgoo · January 2, 2026, 10:56pm

if a flatpak didn’t solve it, then i would suspect haruna just can’t play those types of files.

maybe there is a prior version still available you could roll back to if it was working before.

Riaru · January 3, 2026, 2:29am

the files im trying to open are just simple mp4 files. Even the youtube link shows the same error. I tried rolling back to a previous version but seemed to have some dependency hell issues. For now I think I’ll just stick with mpv.

I must’ve done something wrong since I have another streaming service called Stremio which also has stopped being able to play anything. Just gives the “Playback error please try again”. Definitely something weird happening.

skyfishgoo · January 3, 2026, 3:53pm

if its an error with just specific files, i would start to suspect the files are corrupted in some way.

you could try converting them into another format and then back to .mp4 to see if that process completes and gives you a different result.

Riaru · January 3, 2026, 5:46pm

its not a specific file, it happens with every file.

i tried converting to mov and converting back with no success. seems like it cannot play MOV files either.

skyfishgoo · January 3, 2026, 7:24pm

it’s getting worse!

have you just tried reinstalling VLC to make sure it has everything installed?

and delete your ~/.cache folder and reboot just to make sure everything is where it’s supposed to be.

Guava5 · January 3, 2026, 8:20pm

I’m mostly a vanilla mpv guy, but I’ve played a bit with Haruna.

Have you tried different hardware decoding options?

I’m not aware of any video output settings in Haruna, but mpv changes its vo default from time to time.

I’m looking into it right now, but it might be worth trying to put set vo gpu wlshm (assuming Wayland) in the custom commands tab of Haruna’s setting. This is a fallback vo, if it works it will be a vo issue. (ETA: not 100% certain this will work. According to the documentation you can load mpv.confs, so if mpv works, Haruna should be made workable too)

have you just tried reinstalling VLC to make sure it has everything installed?

Why would installing VLC help with an mpv frontend?

skyfishgoo · January 3, 2026, 8:27pm

just guessing it may be a missing codec thing.

Guava5 · January 3, 2026, 8:35pm

I doubt Fedora’s Haruna package doesn’t include ffmpeg as a dependency.

If it’s a codec issue I’d think it’s hardware-decoding-related instead (although I’m leaning on a video output issue as my previous message indicates)

Riaru · January 4, 2026, 12:32am

I have reinstalled everything (MPV, Haruna, VLC) multiple times without any success unfortunately.

yes, i’ve tried all of them but same result.

tried this as well with no success.

I’ve tried launching it via console to see if it shows any problems but it seems to be doing fine.

Guava5 · January 4, 2026, 9:27am

I googled your issue a bit more and all I can find is this Reddit thread which suggests it might indeed be a codec packaging issue, which I find weird: why would both the Fedora and the Flatpak have the same issue?

Are you running the Flatpak from the Fedora remote or from Flathub?

Riaru · January 4, 2026, 11:01am

Last I tried using flatpaks, I got it from Flathub. Just to test it again, I deleted mpv, vlc and haruna using dnf remove and reinstalled them with flatpaks from flathub. still facing the same issue.

Guava5 · January 4, 2026, 12:49pm

I tried the Haruna packages from the Fedora Flatpak remote and from Flathub on my machine.

The Fedora one didn’t display video like your screenshot, but the Flathub one worked well.

I have no idea what’s happening (*), but if I were you the next thing I’d do is disable the Fedora Flatpak remote from Discover to be sure not to drag bad codec packaging from there. Or just do this.

And then report a bug to Fedora.

(*) ETA: maybe you installed the Haruna from Flathub, but the dependencies (the codecs) were taken from Fedora?

Riaru · January 4, 2026, 2:54pm

Ok i did that, thank you for your suggestion

I installed ffmpeg-full from flathub and tried to uninstall it on Fedora and still doesn’t seem to work. Seems like I’ll be sticking to mpv for a while.