Replaces VLC with Qt

[nicomiguelino]

Description

• Fixes Black screen between videos on Raspberry Pi 3B using it on Raspberry Pi OS 64 Bit Lite #1851
• Qt (via QMediaPlayer) will replace VLC for playing videos.
• This might fix the black gap between active video assets.

Checklist

• Fix skipping of video assets.
• Fix audio output settings (HDMI/3.5 mm).
• Remove unused VLC code and dependencies.
• Test video playback on a 4K display.

Depends on

• Adds a DBus message handler that plays a video via Qt #1931

[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
1 New issue
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
No data about Coverage
0.0% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarCloud

[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
1 New issue
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
0.0% Coverage on New Code
0.0% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarCloud

[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
2 New issues
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
0.0% Coverage on New Code
0.0% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarCloud

[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
2 New issues
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
0.0% Coverage on New Code
0.0% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarQube Cloud

[Onltor]

Description

• Fixes Black screen between videos on Raspberry Pi 3B using it on Raspberry Pi OS 64 Bit Lite #1851
• Qt (via QMediaPlayer) will replace VLC for playing videos.
• This might fix the black gap between active video assets.

Checklist

• Fix skipping of video assets.
• Fix audio output settings (HDMI/3.5 mm).
• Remove unused VLC code and dependencies.
• Test video playback on a 4K display.

Depends on

• Adds a DBus message handler that plays a video via Qt #1931

Dear nicomiguelino,

I would like to draw your attention to one important detail that no one has mentioned: before each video starts, the player (or the procedure calling it) inexplicably reinitializes the HDMI mode, even though it always sets the same mode.

This leads to the following issues:

1. The output device also reinitializes its display mode, showing notifications about the change (only professional media screens more or less smooth out these initializations and suppress the mode-change messages).
2. It's not possible to use Anthias on matrix displays, because every HDMI initialization forces matrix building process to restart.
3. The “black gap” may be caused precisely by that interruption for HDMI initialization.

Before the v0.19.6 release, the black gap also appeared between still images — was HDMI being reinitialized before each image back then?
Not a single well-known commercial or freemium software or hardware (built-in in TVs/monitors) content player resets the HDMI mode before every video: they do it only once at startup!

Please review the code of player procedure in Anthias first — I hope this remark will help the community identify and fix the problem more quickly.

[nicomiguelino]

@Onltor, thank you for sharing your observations.
Everytime a video plays, VLC is started and exists when the video has finished playing. Yes, it is more likely that VLC reinitializes HDMI.

Regarding the image playback before v0.19.6, the black gap between image and web assets is not due to reinitialization. It's more about how those are being played via Qt.

Image and web assets are played via Qt while videos are played via VLC.

We could try checking if it's possible to play videos via VLC without having to reinitialize the display. Otherwise, we'll continue down this path (having the Qt-based WebView play the videos as well).