Can't update or find media player app

My Sailfish OS phone has been off for a while because it’s not my daily driver.
I turned it on to use it to watch an RTSP stream which I figured would be easy enough for anything that runs Linux.

  1. There is a system update which I told to download and install, and it seemed to make progress but checking in on it hours later it seems basically stuck, with progress reset to a couple of percents.
  2. I opened Storeman and was quite puzzled how to update my apps. At some point it did show a Storeman update, but installing it errored with a checksum error I think. And installing any other apps also errored with repo not found errors I think.
  3. I opened Chum GUI which did install updates, but I couldn’t find the media player I found online.

And that is only to get to the stage to do what I actually want to do: find a media player that can play an RTMS stream, and create some sort of launcher/autostart/kiosk for it.

From some ducking I found

So the first I can’t find, and the others fail to install. How can I get unstuck?

I rebooted and just let it sit on the update screen and once again it appeared to get stuck but then when browsing around it suddenly offered to install the update. So I’m not on the latest OS release at least.

Eventually I managed to update storeman, so that’s solved… I guess

I managed to install LLs Video Player by deleting the repo and adding it again. No such luck for Pico Player which continues to give “Couldn’t find package”

However, LLs Video Player gives a white screen and errors with LLs Video Player | OpenRepos.net — Community Repository System

I also installed ffmpeg, but somehow if I type ffmpeg in the terminal (ToeTerm) I get command not found. Also for stuff like this, I don’t seem to have a devel-su command Pico Player | OpenRepos.net — Community Repository System

Meanwhile I opened F-droid, installed VLC, and everything worked right away. This is why my daily driver is still Android.

Apparently SFOS is for developers only because you need to enable developer mode to do something as simple as play a video. That is what allows you to ssh into the phone, run devel-su, and other hacks.

For some reason after a pkcon refresh I could pkcon install picoplayer

After running pkcon install mpris-qt5-qml-plugin LLs Video Player also worked.

I could even install mpv from the command line, but that one still doesn’t launch, which seems like it might be because SFOS isn’t on a modern Qt.

[vo/wlshm/wayland] Compositor doesn't support wl_compositor (ver. 4)
Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (--vo) device.

Finally, I created a custom launcher by

cp /usr/share/applications/harbour-videoPlayer.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/mystream.desktop

and then change it to add the stream URL.

Which… just worked and now doesn’t even start when I copy the original over, wtf I’m so tired.