[SOLVED] VLC crashes: "undefined symbol: vlc_object_hold"

NachoLord · 01-30-2022, 09:26 PM

Hello, GNU/Linux people!

Whenever I try to run VLC, it crashes with the following error:

Code:

vlc: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libvlc.so.5: undefined symbol: vlc_object_hold

I've tried removing it (and it's dependencies), and reinstalling it, but when it reinstalls, the package manager gives a similar error:

Code:

/usr/lib/vlc/vlc-cache-gen: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libvlc.so.5: undefined symbol: vlc_object_hold

This build came right from my distro's official package repo. Any idea what's going on?

Arch Linux, x86_64.

frankbell · 01-30-2022, 09:43 PM

I have never encountered this in years of using VLC on multiple distros. A web search for "VLC symbol lookup error" turns up a number of links that look like they might be a little helpful, but most of them are pretty old. A couple of questions come to mind:

What version of VLC are you running?

Does this occur with multiple media formats (e. g., mp4, avi, flaac, etc.)?

ondoho · 01-31-2022, 10:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NachoLord

Arch Linux, x86_64.

I installed it just for the heck of it and it works, no such message here.
Is your system up-to-date?
In other words did you do 'pacman -Syu vlc' instead of 'pacman -S vlc'?
Do you have non-standard repositories?
Have you also removed its configuration and cache when you reinstalled?
What is the complete output you get when you start vlc in a terminal?
What does 'ls -l /usr/lib/libvlc.so.5' return?

NachoLord · 04-02-2022, 04:15 PM

Hello, sorry for taking so long to respond, as I've been rather busy lately.

@Frankbell: I've had this happen with literally every version of VLC, including the latest versions available in the Arch repos. This happens mere microseconds before the program launches, so I'm unable to even try to open a file.

@Ondoho: Yes, I keep everything up-to-date, running "sudo pacman -Syu" regularly. I don't have any non-standard repos. I have tried removing the cache before reinstalling, but I have no idea what this "configuration" you speak of is. The output of the requested ls command is as follows:

Code:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Mar 13 14:33 /usr/lib/libvlc.so.5 -> libvlc.so.5.6.0

If I do a long ls listing on the symlink's target, I get:

Code:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 161744 Mar 13 14:33 /usr/lib/libvlc.so.5.6.0

NachoLord · 04-02-2022, 04:18 PM

Also, I did an strace on "/usr/lib/vlc/vlc-cache-gen". Since I don't really know how to read strace's output myself, I'll attach it below in hopes that maybe someone else can make sense of it.

NachoLord · 04-02-2022, 04:23 PM

Interesting. I didn't do anything, but now I'm getting a different error message:

Code:

vlc: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libvlc.so.5: undefined symbol: mdate

NachoLord · 04-02-2022, 04:31 PM

You know what? I still don't know how to read strace's output, but I somehow just noticed that it mentioned some libraries in /usr/local/lib/. That's weird, since I don't recall installing vlc there. (I doubt the maintainers of the Arch package would have done so. I have been falling back on an AppImage, but I doubt the AppImage packager would have installed such files.) I guess these are old libraries? I decided to delete anything from the above directory with "vlc" in the name, re-run sudo /usr/lib/vlc/vlc-cache-gen, and presto! Everything works now. Marking as solved.