Troubleshooting • Re: RPI5 - VLC - HEVC/H265 Playback

Are you running the latest Raspberry Pi OS bookworm, the desktop (not lite) image, using the normal labwc/wayland desktop (not X)? If so, VLC should playback HEVC with hardware acceleration by default without changing any options or passing any command-line arguments.

By "over the network" is this just a network share like SMB or NFS? Could you try playing a file locally just to check if that works? The jellyfish test files (https://repo.jellyfin.org/archive/jellyfish/) are useful for testing as they're quite short. Start with the lowest bitrate file at the resolution you want (eg https://repo.jellyfin.org/archive/jelly ... -10bit.mkv), I don't know off the top of my head what the max bitrate/profile we support is.

Thanks for taking the time to respond

I am running Raspberry PI OS Bookworm Desktop, and I am (as far as I can tell) using labwc/wayland.

It's a UDP multicast stream over the network.

I have experimented with some of the sample files you suggested, and they worked fine, so the issue lies somewhere else. I used FFMPEG on another PC to record 30 seconds of this UDP stream, and then tired playing it locally and the same issue arises. (Plays the first few frames and pauses, but the audio is playing fine)

Below is the codec information taken from VLC. The only thing I'm unsure of is the 'Decoded Format' - '4:2:0 YUV Full Scale' - Can the hardware decoder handle this?
The buffer dimensions also show 3840x2176. I've read that this is something to do with the nearest 16x16 grid? But interestingly, when playing back on my windows PC, the buffer dimensions are listed as 3840x2160.



Thanks

Statistics: Posted by FloatingBadger — Fri Aug 01, 2025 2:12 pm

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