Fixes the long-standing "clips show a grey box inside Vice but play fine in other apps" report (#79).
The bug
Some installs were running a Qt WebEngine build with no H.264 decoder. Every Vice clip is H.264, and the failure is completely silent: the audio track plays, the video track is dropped, and the player just shows a grey rectangle. No error is raised anywhere.
This happens when the installer cannot get your distro's PyQt6 WebEngine package and falls back to the PyPI wheel. Distro packages are built with proprietary codecs enabled. The PyPI wheel is not, so it cannot decode H.264 at all. Arch users were never affected, which is why this was hard to pin down.
What changed
- Vice now probes H.264 support at startup. If the engine cannot decode clips, a banner says so and shows the exact package to install for your distro.
- The player, trim view, and hover previews detect playback failures, including the silent no-video-track case, and show an explanation instead of a grey box.
- The clip viewer offers "Open in system player" and "Show in folder" when in-app playback is impossible, so your clips are always one click away.
- Playback failures are logged, so
vice-app --debugnow captures exactly what went wrong. - MKV clips are served with the correct Matroska content type instead of claiming to be MP4.
- The installer warns loudly, including at the end of the install, when it has to fall back to the PyPI wheel, and prints the command that fixes in-app playback.
Updating
Arch: yay -Syu vice-clipper
Other distros: pull the latest and re-run ./install.sh. If you saw the grey box, also install your distro's WebEngine package first: sudo apt install python3-pyqt6.qtwebengine (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint), sudo dnf install python3-pyqt6-webengine (Fedora), sudo zypper install python3-qt6-webengine (openSUSE).