VLC Snap does not support Chromecast

snap
1

Hi,

Posting this here for some insight as although the VLC Snap is maintained upstream, the community here might be able to spot the issue more rapidly and I can see about notifying the devs.

The Snapcraft.yaml for VLC is here.

Issue
Chromecast support is broken in the current VLC Snap.

Expected behaviour
When navigating to “Playback > Renderer” inside VLC, it should find Chromecast-type devices on the local subnet.

Actual behaviour
No Chromecast devices show up in the GUI but no error is visible there.

In a terminal, VLC complains about the lack of avahi daemon.

Output of snap run vlc when opening the “Playback > Renderer” menu:

[00007f12b8432d70] avahi renderer discovery error: failed to create avahi client: Daemon not running
[00007f12b8432d70] main renderer discovery error: no suitable renderer discovery module for 'avahi_renderer'

In contrast, the Flatpak version of VLC seems to work just fine.

The Snapcraft.yaml installs libavahi-client-dev as part of the build-packages stanza so I don’t think this is a case of Avahi support not being built into the final binary.

Is this just a case of VLC missing the :avahi-control interface?

2

snappy-debug suggests:

Log: apparmor="DENIED" operation="dbus_method_call"  bus="system" path="/" interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Peer" member="Ping" mask="send" name="org.freedesktop.Avahi" pid=10211 label="snap.vlc.vlc" peer_pid=2047 peer_label="unconfined"
DBus access
Suggestion:
* try adding 'avahi-control' to 'plugs'
2 Likes
3

Good catch!

Unfortunately, since that plug isn’t declared in the upstream Snapcraft.yaml file, I can’t add it manually.

$ sudo snap connect vlc:avahi-control
error: snap "vlc" has no plug named "avahi-control"

I guess it is down to the upstream developers to fix this one in that case. I will file a bug on their bugtracker.

Edit: Done and posted here on the bugtracker.

1 Like
4

A quick debugging note is that if you want to try adding to an upstream snaps’ plugs, you can try this:

  1. Downloading the snap with snap download

  2. Unpack the snap with unsquashfs from the squashfs-tools package

  3. In the directory squashfs-tools/meta you will find a snap.yaml file

  4. Edit the snap.yaml file to add the plug you want

  5. try the snap with snap try squashfs-root

  6. Connect all the interfaces manually with snap connect (since the autoconnections will not process when installing in this mode)

HTH

3 Likes