Shotcut 26.1 randomly crashes using hardware encoding

josept · February 15, 2026, 12:52pm

Dear Community sharing this problem with you.

I could see radeontop’s graphics pipe reaching reaching 30% and then screen restarting and system freezing…

Motherboard: Asrock H510M-ITX/AC

OS: Linux Mint 22.3: Xfce 64 bit

Linux Kernel: 6.17.0-14-generic

Processor: 11th Gen Intel Core i5-11400F @ 2.60GHz

Graphics Card AMD Cape Verde XT Radeon HD 7770/8760

System RAM: 32 GB

shotcut-log.txt (42.1 KB)

syslog.log (2.2 MB)

I hope this information is helpful.

shotcut · February 15, 2026, 4:52pm

Your GPU driver crashed. It is not clear if or what we can do about it, but you can turn off hardware encoder at least until a new Shotcut or GPU driver.

chiraag · February 16, 2026, 12:22am

Honest question: Are you monitoring thermals? For a while, I had a hard drive that would periodically conk out whenever I used it for too long, and I was sure something was wrong with the drive. It turns out that adding a few more fans (and checking their orientations!) helped and now that drive is totally reliable.

If you’re on a desktop, I would check thermals (like the graphics card temperature) and potentially add more fans (or check the ones you already have). If you’re on a laptop…good luck You might still benefit by opening it up and unclogging the fans, but unfortunately you can’t add any more fans and overall laptop thermals are worse than desktops (laptops frequently run in the 50°C-70°C range but our desktop is insane if it reaches 60°C).

josept · February 16, 2026, 9:25am

Thanks to all… No thermal problems here… The old Radeon is a quite cold card…

I’m running 25.12 without any issue… So, I guess that there’s a problem with either the Radeon driver or 26.1… I will wait until Mint is updated and I will run some tests on Windows, although the Windows computer only uses the Intel CPU integrated GPU…

chiraag · February 16, 2026, 4:40pm

Okay, then yeah…I’d suspect Shotcut here as well (or one of its dependencies, since I’m 99% sure it outsources hardware stuff to MLT(?)). I wonder if there were any AMD-related changes to MLT recently. Presumably, to get 25.12, you had to download the standalone from the Shotcut website, which (I think?) means it contains all dependencies (and doesn’t rely on system versions, unlike the version from your package manager). I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

shotcut · February 16, 2026, 5:32pm

From the log

[Info   ] <main> Starting Shotcut version 26.1.30 
[Info   ] <main> Linux version "22.3" 
[Info   ] <main> number of logical cores = 12 
[Info   ] <main> locale = QLocale(English, Latin, United Kingdom) 
[Info   ] <main> install dir = "/tmp/.mount_shotcuzBHRZX/usr/bin/bin"

That install dir is the signature of an AppImage. I do not understand how the changes between 25.12 and 26.1 could cause this UNLESS you turned on Export > Codec > Use hardware decoder. The default is off. Please check what you are using.

josept · February 16, 2026, 5:53pm

Hi, thank you for you update. Making sure that all the hardware decoding was off, I opened a project with 26.1 but the playback was so laggy that I gave up and went back to 25.12… With 25.12 playback is “normal” with or without hardware acceleration. As you noticed, I’m using Appimage versions, both 25.12 and 26.1… If further logs are needed, I will happily provide them. Many thanks for your support.

shotcut · February 16, 2026, 6:32pm

hardware decoding was off, I opened a project with 26.1 but the playback was so laggy

You wrote about export, and I responded about export, but you replied about something else. Moreover, what you reported about playback does not make any sense for the changes, and I am unable to reproduce it. I will not be able to help you any more for your bug report.