VLC doesn't open when double-clicking file on Nautilus

When double-clicking any video (I tried different formats) VLC just open and close again after around 14 seconds:

It works fine if I:

• Open VLC from terminal or any other way and then open the same file.
• killall nautilus, run nautilus and double-clic the file (that surprise me).
• Use Nemo, Double-commander or other file manager and double-clic the file.

Last think make me think is a nautilus bug, but doesn't happen with any other program.

I tried:

• Bizarre things like tring to fetch stdout/stderr with strace -p`pgrep -l '^vlc$' | col1 | head -1` -s9999 -e write with watch. I couldn't do it.
• On Exec parameter of /usr/share/applications/vlc.desktop I have /usr/bin/vlc --started-from-file %U. Without luck, I tried changing to:
  • /usr/bin/vlc
  • xterm -e "vlc"
  • gnome-terminal -e "vlc". In this last case before previous behavior I get this window:

File format is correctly associated with VLC. If I associate it with other program everything goes fine.

I believe this is a different situation than this one. I already read this, this and this.

Maybe a related useful question could be: How exactly Nautilus run associated program of double-clicked file?

Update 2018-02-12

This happened with Unity, on Ubuntu 16.04. Now with VLC 2.2.2-0-g6259d80 and GNOME nautilus 3.14.3 I don't have this problem anymore. So probably it was a bug on nautilus (since is the same version of VLC).

Solution 1:

Open the terminal:

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/vlc.desktop

After Exec= add:

/usr/bin/vlc --started-from-file %U

If this doesn't work, try just with /usr/bin/vlc. Last resort you could use the following line:

xterm -e "vlc"

But I assume you want to avoid terminal dependency.

Solution 2:

I had a very similar issue - doubleclicking a file did not seem to do anything but when running VLC from command line I was able to play videos. The VLC GUI was missing though.

Because Pablo Bianchi suggested doing killall nautilus, I ran nautilus from command line. That showed me that when I doubleclicked a video, VLC displayed errors I could not see without the command line. I then googled them and stumbled upon this thread.

For me, installing QT4 fixed the problem. Apparently it was an issue with the VLC GUI, not Nautilus.