player: PMP won't start, generating large .xsessions-errors file

[wamari]

Test environment

PMS Version: N/A
PMP Version: 2.10.0.849-e02dbeca
Platform : Antergos Linux

Steps to reproduce

1. Installed latest version of PMP, it may also be an issue with qt5.11

Current behavior

1. PMP stuck on splash screen
2. Genrating large .xsession-errors file, in my case upto 90GB spewing the following lines

[17938:18165:0526/232935.585345:ERROR:gl_surface_qt.cpp(305)] eglCreatePbufferSurface failed and surfaceless context not available
[17938:18165:0526/232935.585356:ERROR:gl_surface_qt.cpp(312)] Requested OpenGL implementation is not supported. Implementation: 0

Expected behavior

1. PMP should open normally

[erenfro]

I am having this issue as well. Soon as you click on a user in a multi-user setup in Plex, those errors start spewing out. This only started happening after updates were installed, of which qt 5.11 was included in that from 5.10.

[wamari]

Have you tried downgrading Qt 5.11? I tried but still not working...

[LongChair]

The official supported Qt version is still 5.9.5.

[erenfro]

I managed to get this working again by downgrading back to qt-5.10 from my package caches, and re-compiling against 5.10 again, so yes, it's some new problem spawned from 5.11 specifically.

[LongChair]

We'll check that when we bump to Qt 5.11, closing this for now.

[wamari]

i also downgraded my Qt 5.11 packages to Qt 5.10 and recompiled, working great now...

[mannp]

@LongChair shouldn't this be opened until plex catches up with the latest qt builds?

Its a show stopper for anyone on any semi recent distros.

[erenfro]

I kinda have to agree in the sense of the actual problem, why it was reported, and the fact that it does effect PMP now, and in the future.

[macdo5]

Having the same issue:
Kernel: 4.16.13-2-ARCH
qt5 version: 5.11.0-1
plex-media-player version: 2.11.0-1

Can this ticket please be re-opened until the issue is resolved?

[erenfro]

Also, for reference. Solus issues regarding this as well:
https://dev.solus-project.com/T6542

[AndreasBackx]

@LongChair any update or ETA on this? Downgrading can be a pita on Arch.

[atriko]

Completely unusable on my Arch Linux HTPC without qt 5.11 support.

I've canceled my Plex Pass until you have qt 5.11 support.

[mseeley]

Longchair is out for a bit, bumping so we see this during triage.

[wamari]

Completely unusable for now with qt 5.11 resorted to using kodi with plex add on until this is resolved. On Jul 3, 2018 2:41 AM, Matt Seeley <notifications@github.com> wrote: Reopened #743<#743>. — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#743 (comment)>, or mute the thread<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AF1DjDJVcl5TpTiexbop5BsN-tVXpPhoks5uCq-MgaJpZM4UPC7g>.

[SilverMight]

Glad to see the issue was reopened. I'm also experiencing this issue on Arch, qt 5.11

[mseeley]

No not yet. Updating the QT dependency requires special knowledge and takes work across several teams. We're discussing how to get this done. Will update here when we have a better idea wrt timing.

[mseeley]

Self-assigning for tracking.

[hak8or]

In the meantime, for anyone who finds this via googling, what's the recommended way to downgrade QT on Arch to get this working? Is it only during the compilation, or is it also to run it?

[duyfken]

@hak8or Install downgrade from the AUR and use this command in the terminal and select the last version before QT 5.11 (QT 5.10.1 from memory):

downgrade qt5-base qt5-declarative qt5-location qt5-quickcontrols qt5-webchannel qt5-webengine qt5-x11extras qt5-xmlpatterns qt5-script

Then install plex-media-player from the AUR and it should now build the latest PMP version correctly

(if it offers to add the qt5 packages above to IgnorePkg, do it. Then the qt5 packages won't be upgraded until you go back and remove them from IgnorePkg either in Pamac or /etc/pacman.conf after this issue has been fixed)

[vguerci]

@hak8or , @duyfken be careful that downgrade won't care about keeping dependencies consistent, i.e. by doing this, you can break other packages that depends on qt 5.11, like KDE...

[yacn]

In the meantime, for anyone who finds this via googling, what's the recommended way to downgrade QT on Arch to get this working? Is it only during the compilation, or is it also to run it?

@hak8or easiest workaround to avoid messing with your dependencies (which can make life hell on any OS but especially Arch) is to install Kodi and use the Plex for Kodi plugin

[zevdg]

Alternatively, just use https://app.plex.tv or your locally hosted version until this is fixed.

If you're running a recent build of chrome you can even "install" the plex web app by choosing "Create Shortcut" in Chrome's menu. You might have to enable "Desktop PWAs" in chrome://flags first.

[redxtech]

Is there any ETA on when we can expect QT 5.11 support?

[mannp]

your best bet to build on Linux is to use a dedicated environment such as VM or Docker container. This allows for building with a Qt version that doesn't affect the overall system dependencies..

As a paying customer since you started charging I am not sure what you are saying.

That we should create a separate build environment ourselves in order that we can use your app on a recent linux distro?

I thought I was paying for a service, rather than a build your own environment to use your app.

[AndreasBackx]

@sentriz thank you. I'll give that a shot.

I do wonder how come PMP depends so much on Qt. Is there much more to it than a Qt Webkit Bridge?

[yacn]

@sentriz bundling old dependencies is bad engineering.

@mseeley the issue isn't fixed, this ticket should still remain open... unless you are claiming plex's stance on this ticket is WONTFIX

[thedanbob]

To quote an earlier reply,

While I agree that it's not a solution, it would provide a decent workaround in the interim period until QT 5.11 support is added.

[sentriz]

@yacn I didn't say it was good engineering, but it's a decent workaround given the current situation

[MobiusReactor]

For those running an Arch-based distro, someone took the time to add the appropriate version of qt5 to the AUR and the AUR plexmediaplayer package now uses those as dependencies. For me, this seems to work better than the flatpak package which seemed to be running a bit slow. Again it's not exactly an ideal situation because it means having two different versions of qt installed, but until plex gets updated it'll have to do.

Details available in the comments here.

[hak8or]

I can confirm this works on arch after the changes the package maintainer made. Thank you! It's shocking how plex doesn't consider this a critical bug that should be fixed immediately considering the impact it's had on so many people based on this git issue alone. Keep in mind it takes a very long time to compile, meaning on my system it took over 2 hours (i5-3570k). Most of this seems to be webkit.

…

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 12:43 PM Scott Johnston ***@***.***> wrote: For those running an Arch-based distro, someone took the time to add the appropriate version of qt5 to the AUR and the AUR plexmediaplayer package now uses those as dependencies. For me, this seems to work better than the flatpak package which seemed to be running a bit slow. Details available in the comments here <https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/plex-media-player/>. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#743 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA5gCkI0gNQaTGjq2d2R6wsOAXFWtFEEks5uVXNDgaJpZM4UPC7g> .

[AndreasBackx]

Can this be moved up the to-do list? I don't get how it is acceptable for us to compile the entirety of Qt which takes 1-2 hours on relatively high-end systems for consumers or requiring us to downgrade. It's been 3 months and there's no update on this. If Plex doesn't plan on supporting Linux machines, then I might as well just start paying for a different service.

Could we at least get more information on the issue so we could perhaps start fixing it ourselves? @mseeley

[MobiusReactor]

I have to say I agree with @yacn, unless there is no intention to fix this at all, this is an ongoing issue and should not be closed. There are workarounds, but none of them are exactly ideal.

[vguerci]

What about supporting several qt versions?

#if QT_VERSION < 0x050000
.....
#else
.....
#endif

[mseeley]

Hi there everyone. I appreciate the kind feedback.

Our Qt version dependency is locked at 5.9.5 for the foreseeable future. Updating the build-time Qt dependency requires us to update supporting build infrastructure. Our team is small and the subset capable of making the infrastructure changes is smaller still. This work in on a todo list although you can imagine it's not alone.

This changed the issue from a bug to a known limitation once the correct Qt version information was included in our documentation. With this in mind I closed this issue. I don't believe an open to-do issue without a milestone is helpful.

@AndreasBackx I don't know how the Qt dependency is handled for Linux. On macOS and Windows the Qt dependency is downloaded from Conan. If it's handled the same I'm unsure what our options are. If it is somehow handled differently perhaps we have some leeway.

[AndreasBackx]

@mseeley the solution we currently have on Arch (don't know about the rest) is compiling the Qt dependencies on our machine. Which thanks to degeberg on the AUR is automatically done when installing the plex-media-player package. The problem however is that this takes around 2 hours even on my machine (which has a Ryzen 1700). My machine certainly isn't the top of the line, but it should be in the top range of PCs. If my PC takes such a long time, it might take a whole day for some laptops. Granted it's a one-time thing I assume, it makes Plex almost unusable for people with a laptop running Arch. Many people use a barebones Linux distro because they've got an old laptop so I assume a relatively high percentage of people might face this problem.

Could we just get some more information on what we can do in a PR perhaps to add support for Qt 5.11 ourselves? I've never worked with Qt myself, but I might be able to learn it or someone else might be able to pick it up.

Updating the build-time Qt dependency requires us to update supporting build infrastructure.

We don't really know what exactly you mean with "supporting build infrastructure". What is so tightly integrated on the backend (I assume that's what you mean) with Qt?

[Libbum]

"We have to upgrade our build system to provide an application you pay for, so please downgrade your build system instead" seems like a really odd way of running a business based on software.

[rphillips]

Arch has the current release of QT version 5.11.1. I found an issue and patch for the exact OpenGL context error we are seeing being patched in QT 5.11.2. According to QT's wiki, the release of QT 5.11.2 should be sometime this week (or so). I haven't build QT 5.11.2 (or master) from version control to test this out, but once QT 5.11.2 is released PMP might just work.

https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-68479

[sdilts]

I'm on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and I have had no problems with Qt 5.11.1 and the player. My version of libqt5-qtbase-devel is:

Name        : libqt5-qtbase-devel
Version     : 5.11.1
Release     : 4.1
Architecture: x86_64
Install Date: Thu 06 Sep 2018 09:49:58 PM MDT
Source RPM  : libqt5-qtbase-5.11.1-4.1.src.rpm
Build Date  : Mon 03 Sep 2018 03:17:12 AM MDT

So if you do have Qt 5.11, try it anyways, it may work.

EDIT: never mind. Same issue. This occurred when TV view is activated, but everything works well in the other mode.

[rphillips]

Just to followup from my previous post, Arch was updated with 5.11.2 of QT. Plex Media Player (plex-media-player-git from AUR) is running smoothly for me.

[Libbum]

@rphillips am I missing something here? The -git AUR package still has qt5-pmp-quickcontrols, qt5-pmp-webengine, and qt5-pmp-x11extras dependencies, so it's still building against 5.9.5 right?

[rphillips]

There is a dependency on qt5-pmp-webengine, but the binary is linked against qt5-webengine (5.11.2).

[SilverMight]

Definitely works. I removed the qt5-pmp dependency and made sure it wasn't installed and it works fine

[iurab]

Can somebody post the steps needed to remove the qt5-pmp dependency?

[mseeley]

Thanks @rphillips. There's another indication that Qt 5.11.2, #785, is also working correctly. Has anyone else confirmed?

[truckershitch]

I'm running PMP in Fedora 29 with Qt Webengine 5.11.2. I had to install the F30 version of Qt Webengine, but the other RPMS were from F29. I've been running it for a few weeks now.

[Kriskras99]

It works for me with Qt 5.11.2 on Arch Linux

[Kriskras99]

@iurab to delete the qt5-pmp packages just run this command:
sudo pacman -R qt5-pmp-base qt5-pmp-declarative qt5-pmp-location qt5-pmp-quickcontrols qt5-pmp-webchannel qt5-pmp-webengine qt5-pmp-x11extras qt5-pmp-xcb-private-headers qt5-pmp-xmlpatterns

[MobiusReactor]

I can confirm it seems to be working for me now as well.

[DavidCWGA]

For what it's worth, it's still broken in Fedora 29 Beta. (And 28, obviously.)

[mseeley]

Excellent, thank you everyone whom provided feedback. 🌤🌈

Thank you too @rphillips for locating the issues and resolution in Qt 5.11.2 and you too @Kriskras99 for the pacman recipe. 👍

[truckershitch]

@DavidCWGA

For what it's worth, it's still broken in Fedora 29 Beta. (And 28, obviously.)

In Fedora 29 Beta, you can run

sudo dnf upgrade qt5-qtwebengine --releasever=30

and install the version from Rawhide. When there is an F29 release of 5.11.2, you can install it instead.