Anki Voice Recording Doesn't Work - Arch Linux

Anki Help
1

Hello!

Running Anki on Arch via the AUR repository. Using the latest compiled package, but still can’t record my voice.

Here’s the output of the error:

[avantbored@avantbored ~]$ anki
Starting Anki 25.07.2...
Wayland support is disabled by default due to bugs:
https://github.com/ankitects/anki/issues/1767
You can force it on with an env var: ANKI_WAYLAND=1
Fontconfig warning: using without calling FcInit()
2025-07-10 16:33:40,460:INFO:aqt.mediasrv: Serving on http://127.0.0.1:43305
Starting main loop...
JS warning /_anki/js/vendor/mathjax/tex-chtml-full.js:1 No version information available for component [tex]/noerrors
JS warning /_anki/js/vendor/mathjax/tex-chtml-full.js:1 No version information available for component [tex]/mathtools
Qt info: Using Qt multimedia with FFmpeg version n7.1.1 GPL version 3 or later 
Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or director

Any insight? Thank you!

2

That looks like it is related to a sound driver, doesn’t it?

Is this a fresh install, or did you recently upgrade to 25.07.2? Was it working before the upgrade?

3

Thanks for your reply!

I can confirm the function was not working before I updated; pre-update, this was the same error.

4

Was there some point where it stopped working and then something changed? Or has it never worked (since the first time you tried it)?

5

The error is stating that a shared library is missing, when Qt was looking for FFmpeg. Do you happen to know whether FFmpeg has been installed? I do not know anything about Arch Linux (although I know about other flavours). Perhaps this article might be of help.

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6

It has never worked for me.

Thanks for your reply. I just checked if this was the case. See below output.

pacman -Q ffmpeg
ffmpeg 2:7.1.1-4
7

Great! So you have FFmpeg installed.

Has mplayer been installed? That seems to be the program that uses libvdpau.

The error is complaining about a shared library libvdpau_nvidia.so installed. Can you check?
I used this command on my Linux Mint system: ldconfig -p | grep libvdpau.

Another thing you can try is the following.

  1. Find out where your FFmpeg program is installed: whereis ffmpeg .
  2. Find out whether it does indeed depend on the library that is supposed to be missing: ldd /usr/bin/ffmpeg | grep libvdpau . (Replace the file path with the one returned from your whereis command.
  3. Check to see whether the link that you seek exists on your system: locate libvdpau | grep nvidia . On my system — and looking through some Internet searches — it seems that the file you seek is in fact a symbolic link to a version-specific libvdpau_nvidia.so . Does the locate command return any references to libvdpau_nvidia libraries? One or two may have version numbers at the end of its name. See this article, but it references Debian, not Arch Linux.
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8

Hi Matta, thanks for your attention to this and your clear instructions.

Some outputs:

whereis libvdpau_nvidia.so
libvdpau_nvidia.so:

whereis ffmpeg
ffmpeg: /usr/bin/ffmpeg /usr/share/ffmpeg /usr/share/man/man1/ffmpeg.1.gz

ldconfig -p | grep libvdpau
	libvdpau.so.1 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libvdpau.so.1
	libvdpau.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libvdpau.so

No output:

 locate lidvdpau | grep nvidia
9

That article gives some ideas for linking the shared library, which might help.

Did you check whether mpv is installed? It is one of the packages that requires libvdpau.so. It might set things up for you, if you do not have it installed already.

10

Thanks – I’ll look into creating the link!

mpv is indeed installed.

11

Anki uses QtMultimedia for recording, so the issue is likely in Qt/your distro’s available nvidia libraries. It’s probably not connected to mpv, since you said you can play audio.

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