Troubleshooting QGC Setup

This topic lists troubleshooting information related to QGroundControl setup and installation on the host computer.

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Problems when using QGroundControl to interact with a vehicle are covered in: QGC Vehicle Interaction Problems.

Windows: UI Rendering/Video Driver Issues

If you experience UI rendering issues or video driver crashes on Windows, this may be caused by "flaky" OpenGL drivers. QGroundControl provides 3 shortcuts that you can use to start QGroundControl in "safer" video modes (try these in order):

• QGroundControl: QGC uses OpenGL graphics drivers directly.
• GPU Compatibility Mode: QGC uses ANGLE drivers, which implement OpenGL on top of DirectX.
• GPU Safe Mode: QGC uses a software rasterizer for the UI (this is very slow).

Windows: Doesn't connect to Vehicle over WiFi

If QGroundControl sits forever (for example, Waiting For Vehicle Connection) when trying to connect to the vehicle over Wifi, a possible cause is that IP traffic is being blocked by firewall software (e.g. Windows Defender, Norton, etc.).

The solution is to allow the QGroundControl app through the firewall.

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It is possible to simply switch the network profile from Public to Private to allow connections, but this exposes your PC to the Network, so be careful

If using Windows Defender:

• In the Start bar, enter/select: Firewall & Network Protection (System Settings).

• Scroll to and select the option: Allow an app through firewall.

• Select QGroundControl and change the Access selector to Allow.

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  Programs are listed in alphabetical order by description (not filename). You'll find QGC under O: Open source ground control app provided by QGroundControl dev team

Ubuntu: Video Streaming Fails (Missing Gstreamer)

On Ubuntu you must install Gstreamer components in order to see video streams. If these are not installed QGroundControl is unable to create the gstreamer nodes and fails with:

VideoReceiver::start() failed. Error with gst_element_factory_make(‘avdec_h264’)

The download/install instructions for Ubuntu include GStreamer setup information.

Ubuntu 18.04: Video Streaming Fails on Dual Video Adapter Systems

The version of GStreamer in Ubuntu 18.04 has a bug that prevents video displaying when using a VA API based decoder (i.e. vaapih264dec etc.) on systems that have both Intel and NVidia video display adapters.

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More generally, while the problem is known to occur on Ubuntu 18.04 with Intel and NVidia VGAs, it might occur on any linux system and other types of (dual) VGAs.

The easiest way to get QGroundControl to work in this case is to start it using the following command line:

LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=fakedriver ./QGroundControl

Other alternatives are to disable one of the VGAs, uninstall VA API components, or upgrade to GStreamer 1.16 (there is no easy way to do this on Ubuntu 18.04 - please contribute a recipe if you find one!)