No video shown when playing a WebM file in VLC

When I tried to play a YouTube video I downloaded as a WebM file using yt-dlp on an Ubuntu Linux system in the VLC media player application, I could hear the audio, but no video was shown. I tried opening a few other .webm videos and found I was able to view the video in some, but not others, though I was able to view the video and hear the audio in all the .mp4 and .mkv files. I tried changing the video output setting from "Automatic" to "OpenGL video output" and then "XVideo output (XCB)", which you can do by clicking on Tools, then Preferences, then Video, and then selecting those options from the dropdown list next to Output, but neither of those options resolved the problem, so I reset Output to Automatic. I was able to resolve the problem by taking the following steps, though:

1. In the VLC program, click on Tools and then select Preferences.
2. Click on Input/Codecs and change the hardware-accelerated decoding setting by clicking on the downward arrowhead next to Automatic, which will be the setting if the default setting is in effect.
3. Change the setting to Disable and then click on Save.

When I checked the Codec information for the file where I could not view the video before disabling the hardware-accelerated decoding setting, which you can do by opening an audiovisual (AV) file in VLC and then selecting Tools and Codec Information, I saw the video codec was AOMedia's AV1 Video (av01). When I checked the video codec for another WebM file where the video wasn't visible in VLC, I saw it was also the AOMedia's AV1 Video (av01) codec. Checking the video codec for .webm files where I could view the video, I saw Google/ON2's VP9 Video (VP90) for some and H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1) for another.

Note: you can also determine the codecs used in a file using the mediainfo utility, which you can install on an Ubuntu system with sudo apt-get install mediainfo. You can check on whether it is already installed using the command which mediainfo, which would show the location of the mediainfo executable file if the application was installed, or you can use dpkg -s mediainfo, which will show details on the mediainfo package if it is installed.

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Listening to Jamendo artists through VLC

The VLC media player, which is a free and open-source media player available for the Windows, OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Android, iOS, Chrome OS, Windows Phone, QNX, Haiku, Syllable, and OS/2 operating systems provides a convenient means to acces free music from Jamendo, a community of independent artists and music lovers that bills itself as "the world's largest digital service for free music". As of January 2015, Jamendo listed 460,000 tracks with more than 250 million downloads since the launch of the platform. Jamendo is a portmanteau of "jam session" and "crescendo".

The music provided through Jamendo is free for personal use, so you can download songs musicians have provided through the service legally. Jamendo's goal is to link artists who want to share their music and music lovers around the world. Jamendo provides an opportunity for the musicians that provide their music to Jamendo to obtain revenue from music synchronization licensing, i.e., the licensing of the right to synchronize the music with visual media, such as film, television shows, advertistements, video games, website music, movie trailers, etc., and through licensing the music to be used as background music for films, TV, Internet video, such as video logs, aka vlogs, etc.

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Converting audio/video files to another format with VLC

The free and open-source (FOSS) VLC program can be used to convert audio and video files from one format to another. VLC is a cross-platform, audio/video (A/V) program that is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS systems.

VLC originated as an academic project in 1996. It was rewritten from scractch in 1998 and released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in 2001 - see the Wikipedia article VLC media player for further details on the development history for the application.

Steps for converting a file from one format to another, e.g., a FLAC audio file to an MP3 audio format are provided here.

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