VLC could not decode the format "a52 " (A52 Audio (aka AC3))

Issues & Assistance
1

I installed CachyOS a couple of days ago.

I’m trying to play back an mkv file I made a couple of years ago using MakeMKV.

I get a “Codec not supported” error, specifically “VLC could not decode the format "a52 " (A52 Audio (aka AC3))”

I have installed vlc-plugins-all but that has not fixed the issue.

Any advice is appreciated.

2

Try installing a52dec package.
vlc-plugin-a52dec installed?

3

Yes, latest version 3.0.21-32.1 is already installed.

Additionally, if I open VLC, click on the Tools menu and select “Plugins and extensions” then click on the “Plugins” tab and search for “a52” I can see a plugin called MPEG-I/II/4 / A52 / DTC / MLP audio with the demux Capability and a Score of 155.

4

is it required that it be played with vlc?

did you try playing it with ffmpeg (through ffplay) or mpv?

5

mvp won’t open at all, it gives me this error:

mpv: error while loading shared libraries: libSvtAv1Enc.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Which I think is because of the special version of handbrake I am using to do AV1 encodes.

If I run sudo pacman -S svt-av1 mpv it wants to remove some of that:

:: svt-av1-4.0.1-2 and svt-av1-psy-1:v2.1.0.r0.g5471bd78-3 are in conflict. Remove svt-av1-psy?

6

The version of this in the repos is very out of date.

Only providing libSvtAv1Enc.so.2 (while svt-av1 provides libSvtAv1Enc.so.4 that most other software is expecting).

I am not sure of what state the AUR version is currently .. but these out of date svt-av1* packages are the source of your problem.

Yes.
And then how do things work?