VLC freezes while playing?

Message

pmam · Post by **pmam** » Mon Feb 16, 2015 8:29 am

I try to play with VLC different types of video files, but it freezes a lot.
Please advise if there is anything to change in the settings?

Roman_Gruber · Post by **Roman_Gruber** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 11:45 pm

you may start in the command line and provide us with maybe some error messages.
you may also check with glxinfo if you have direct rendering as yes.

and you may also check how your cpu utilization is. Lets assume your box is powerful enough and not such a low powered device like a rasperi pi or something like that..

did you check dmesg after your freezes? enough ram / swap?

Adarion · Post by **Adarion** » Mon Feb 23, 2015 9:35 am

What kind of freezes are there and what media were you playing? I got several freezes that were not easy to reproduce, but they froze my hardware actually - sometimes beyond REISUB. If just VLC itself freezes you might obtain a few hints by tw04l124's suggestions. The command line sometimes spits out a lot of information.

pmam · Post by **pmam** » Mon Feb 23, 2015 10:29 am

tw04l124 & Adarion Hi,

I was busy with other issues - Thanks for remind me to handle vlc's issue

Here output from terminal - I guess you mean just to hit vlc - if not - please inform me the right command - anyway it seems there is an error...

Code: Select all

vlc
VLC media player 2.1.2 Rincewind (revision 2.1.2-0-ga4c4876)
[0xd0e118] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[0xdb9168] qt4 interface error: Unable to load extensions module

Please advise how to load...

you may also check with glxinfo if you have direct rendering as yes.

I am not familiar with glxinfo - Please advise what exactly to do?

and you may also check how your cpu utilization is. Lets assume your box is powerful enough and not such a low powered device like a rasperi pi or something like that..
did you check dmesg after your freezes? enough ram / swap?

It is Duo2cores machine and it was ok in the past - I dont know what has changed - machine powerful enough...

What kind of freezes are there and what media were you playing

I was not clear enough - The machine is not freezing, only the film is freezing for a moment and then continue playing, and freezing again afterword...
It is .mkv media files.
BTW: What is 'REISUB'?

Thanks

Adarion · Post by **Adarion** » Mon Feb 23, 2015 1:15 pm

> qt4 interface error: Unable to load extensions module

Oh well, I think I got that one also all the time. Even though I should have all sorts of qt libs on my system and compiled vlc with USE="... qt4 ..."
But that shold not lead to the described issue.
Do you play the movie from hard disk, ssd, network or optical media? There could be a bottleneck.
Also, what resolution is the video and do you know what codec it uses? You might check VLC's info on codecs, you can invoke that by pressing Ctrl-I iirc. or check menu / context menu for it.
It could be too large or use an unaccelerated codec.
Also how strong is your machine? Is there enough free RAM? (you can find out about that with various tools, KDE should have Ctrl-ESC process manager, on the console you can use "free -h" or "top" / "htop". They all show current memory consumption in a more or less comfortable way.
Just to be sure you're not running out of RAM.

> glxinfo

Code: Select all

glxinfo |grep rendering

Will show you if you have direct rendering and thus if your GPU acceleration works for most parts. Without it (if it says "no" in the output) you will experience all sorts of slowness in the system.

There is also vdpauinfo (from the package x11-misc/vdpauinfo) that will show you informations about the VDPAU status on your system (unless you use intel graphics, that normally works via VA-API, maybe it also has some program). It's still another thing to inteprete the output.

mrbassie · Post by **mrbassie** » Mon Feb 23, 2015 7:10 pm

pmam wrote: I was not clear enough - The machine is not freezing, only the film is freezing for a moment and then continue playing, and freezing again afterword...
It is .mkv media files.

Thanks

I get this with higher res vids than my hw can handle. Can't speak for other hw than I own but the intel gfx drivers at least under Linux are nowhere near as good as the windows equivalents.
I've got machines at work with pentium d chipsets and vista stickers, xp installed (not by me, inherited) 2G ram which will do 1080p just fine, I've got a machine at home with a pentium g2030 (which I think is basically an i3 with hyperthreading disabled) and 8G of ram which fall over at that resolution with Linux drivers.

nokilli · Post by **nokilli** » Sun Apr 19, 2015 7:51 am

Recent versions of VLC have peformed very poorly for me. I'd love to go back to say, the version I was using six months ago, but I don't have the emerge-fu necessary to do this _painlessly_.

Symptoms are just as OP describes, but as I'm on a netbook, the freezes are pretty much a constant annoyance, to the point where the video becomes unwatchable.

charles17 · Post by **charles17** » Sun Apr 19, 2015 3:50 pm

nokilli wrote:Recent versions of VLC have peformed very poorly for me. I'd love to go back to say, the version I was using six months ago, but I don't have the emerge-fu necessary to do this _painlessly_.

Assume your VLC runs with ffmpeg. Are the problems the same when playing your media in ffplay instead of VLC? Then the problem is ffmpeg.

nokilli · Post by **nokilli** » Tue Apr 21, 2015 10:03 am

charles17 wrote:Assume your VLC runs with ffmpeg. Are the problems the same when playing your media in ffplay instead of VLC?

Only had a few minutes to test this and I can't give you conclusive results as ffplay seems to want to seek randomly into the video and start playing from there. But what it does play it plays flawlessly.

I'll spend more time with it hopefully tomorrow.

szatox · Post by **szatox** » Tue Apr 21, 2015 7:13 pm

VLC has a lot of options for video playback, try changing them.
Video output is a good starting point, chosing wrong one could make a horrible mess of mplayer as well.

nokilli · Post by **nokilli** » Sat Apr 25, 2015 11:03 am

charles17 wrote:Assume your VLC runs with ffmpeg. Are the problems the same when playing your media in ffplay instead of VLC? Then the problem is ffmpeg.

Had the opportunity to test this further and it's very clearly a problem with VLC.

szatox wrote:VLC has a lot of options for video playback, try changing them.

Have iterated through the complete set of video output options, reset my preferences, run with -vvv to look for something obvious that might be wrong; no luck with any of this.

Double checked my USE flags, including my CPU_FLAGS_X86 variable, it's all good.

VLC used to be something I could throw any video at and with very very few exceptions it would perform admirably every single time. Now it's almost useless... on the netbook. On my MacBook it still shines, but then too that's a fairly beefy box.

A consolation however is that mplayer appears to have stepped up its game. Used to be that when I would have to fall back on mplayer that I'd be plagued with audio sync issues. Sometimes this got so bad that trying to manually correct would almost become like playing a video game. But with the very recent versions this is no longer the case.

iamkristi · Post by **iamkristi** » Tue May 05, 2015 4:39 pm

thank you for all the replies, i had the same problem.