On Thursday 30 July 2026 07:51:08 dep via tde-users wrote:
Well, you might be able to get Hypnotix to work. After some fiddling I was able to get it, but while it starts it won't play any channels. Also, it is probably overly simple for toyr tastes. It was all the rage in the Linux press a couple of years ago. Don't hear much about it now. https://github.com/linuxmint/hypnotix
Well, I did manage to get VLC working adequately, after all; so from a purely practical point of view, my issue is resolved.
I ought to say that I haven't used VLC it at least five years. It works well enough, but for playing actual video files from my machine, I prefer smplayer. And since I've hardly ever tried streaming videos, I haven't needed anything else. And I can't stand commercials, advertisements, nor even PBS pledge drives. If I want to watch something from YT, I use yt-dlp and download the video to my machine, the use smplayer to watch it.
When I saw all the channels available on these playlists, temptation took hold of me. But I can stop anytime I want.
After fiddling with both IPTVnator and VLC, I remembered that this had happened to me before, years ago, but that I still had my old configuration files for VLC buried away somewhere. So I made a backup of my current settings, just in case, then did some overwriting, replacing the existing configuration with the old config files ... and presto! VLC works again.
There is still the unsolved riddle of why VLC was crashing, and why it's somehow connected to gtk2 and/or tqt, or whatever. Now when I start up VLC and try to play a channel, I get a window saying that it cannot play. Then I go into settings > audio > and set my audio device:
HD audio generic, ALC257 Analog Hardware device with all software conversions
and it works again. I tried changing this to my default setting in the config, but somehow VLC or something keeps resetting it to Default, whereas I want my default to be that preferred setting. I will go into the configuration to see if I can make it permanent. But for now, it is a puzzle.
I do remember that I had the problem before, when I used VLC years ago (before 2021 or so), and it's why I switched to smplayer for playing actual video files.
Regarding my alleged "taste" for complexity: this is not so. Sometimes I want things just as simple as can be; for example, I want a text editor that is just a text editor and nothing else, so I still use an old leafpad package from Devuan/Debian Jessie, because it requires no dependencies, and still works. I don't need markup, don't do coding, etc. I just want a simple text editor.
Also, I like to keep my online and offline programs and activities separate; my own habit of a kind of sandboxing. For example, I use qmmp online for streaming radio, but use audacious for playing music files from my machine. Same thing here; I'd rather keep smplayer for my offline player, and VLC for online video streaming.
Also, both smplayer and VLC accept my TDE color scheme, whereas most others don't.
For video, however, and especially for sound, I care more about quality, so I want to be able to shape it until it looks and sounds right. I might try using IPTVnator with VLC as my player; it did give it a go last night, but I was still wrestling with VLC configuration, and it wasn't working any better like that. Or I might try Hypnotix. But for now, I got VLC working well enough, so it's no longer an issue, just a puzzle why this keeps happening.
The first couple times I run VLC, it's just fine, then it starts crashing, that gtk2-tqt issue, then I remember to overwrite the config file, then it works. Now, as I said, I get this notification window that says it cannot play my sound, and I have to go into the audio settings ... every single time.
So now it is really just a matter of how to make my VLC configuration settings permanent.
Thanks to dep and Nik for help. I would still like to get to the root of that issue, but now it is more just to satisfy my own curiosity.
Bill