I recently started using Fedora KDE and I love it. I tried to use Dragon video player as it came with the OS but as soon as I tried to use I was faced with this.
//imgur com/a/ghGiUpd (ignore the framerate it is caused by the screen recorder)
The screen flicker when the scene changes but otherwise is entirely white and when something gets over the video such as a right click menu or a different screen the video shows up briefly. It also shows the background when it first starts but the video didn’t capture that too much.
Am I doing something wrong? Is something misconfigured? Or is this a bug that I should report? I am happily using mpv now but new users might be scared off if they encounter this. Thank you for reading.
Just to check - have you followed any specific instructions around installing proprietary/patented multimedia codecs on your device? You probably would have visited this page as part of that process if so: Howto/Multimedia - RPM Fusion
Hmm - if you’ve already followed all of the steps on that RPMFusion page, then it’s less likely to be codec-related. To hopefully help get some ideas:
Can you please post your system information from the Info Center app? The Copy Details button is the easiest way to get that ready to paste in:
Is mpv installed from your distribution’s repositories, or from Flathub? I’m asking as Flatpak applications on Flathub tend to use components that include proprietary/licensed codecs - so if mpv is from the Fedora distribution repositories but still works fine, that would further rule out a codec issue.
And something that’s sticking in my head from when I installed Fedora KDE…do you have VLC installed by chance? If not, does anything change if you install it?
Operating System: Fedora Linux 41
KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.10.0
Qt Version: 6.8.1
Kernel Version: 6.12.11-200.fc41.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i3-10100F CPU @ 3.60GHz
Memory: 15.5 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: H410M H V3
I don’t use flatpak for mpv so I assume it is not a codec issue like you said and I can’t believe it but installing VLC fixed Dragon player for some reason. Do you think something necessary for Dragon is not being downloaded and only when VLC is downloaded it uses it? I guess I can go through the list of packages downloaded with VLC and try to find what that is.
I only wanted dragon player to work because I encountered the same issue when I tried to run video files in Dolphin’s preview panel(F11) and it looked like it used Dragon. Thank you for all your help so far by the way. I really appreciate it.
It appears that “vlc-plugin-ffmpeg” was the package that was necessary now I can play everything with dragon. Should I go ahead and report this somewhere? I would like to contribute to open source software. Thank you for all your help!
From what I can see, this comes down to how the Dragon Player application, and the supporting libraries, are packaged in the Fedora repositories. Ultimately then, this would be downstream of KDE itself, since distributions ultimately control how their package managers view dependencies.
That’s awesome that you’re looking for ways to contribute! Personally, I’d suggest checking with the Fedora KDE Special Interest Group - probably through their Matrix channel first - to see if there are any existing thoughts on how to make that smoother and easier for newcomers.
Some possible context to take over to the Fedora folks:
I suspect this is a tough spot because of the issues uncovered here: Issue #419: Phonon-backend-gstreamer fails to build for qt6 - SIG - Pagure.io - Dragon Player is a front-end that connects to Phonon, the KDE/Qt API for multimedia playback. Phonon can, in turn, use various backend frameworks to handle media file decoding and all of that.
With the GStreamer backend not really being an option anymore, getting the full playback capabilities out of applications like Dragon requires a different one. VLC provides such an ability, but the current packaging has that backend as a “hint”, rather than a full-on dependency. That might be to try to avoid more cascading dependencies of VLC getting installed automatically with every Fedora KDE setup, but I’d defer to the folks over there for the best guidance on how to proceed
The reason is because installing VLC brings with it the vlc-libs package. Dragon Player uses this internally as well; if it’s missing, it won’t work!
(it’s slightly more complicated than that; Dragon is capable of using multiple backends, but as of 2025, the VLC backend — provided by the phonon-qt6-backend-vlc package — is the only one that really works, making it de facto mandatory).
As such, please report this to the Fedora KDE folks. Installing Dragon Player should automatically install the VLC backend and vlc-libs package.
It is the first time I issue a report and I reported it at pagure io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/612 (I can’t post links for some reason). If you have time, let me know if it needs additional information. Thanks for the help!
