When playing videos (avi/mpeg/etc) media player crashes and freezes system

[qyron]

When playing videos either from HDD or CD/DVD, the media player blocks, freezing the entire system, sometimes "hostaging" the sound card, making the last sound loop infinitily. The only way to get out of this is by forcing shutdown by hardware switch.

I've noted this behaviour on Totem and VLC. The exact moment when it occurs is random, either happening on the first few seconds of playing, during playback after a long period of viewing or at the end (this happening more with short-lenght movies).

There is no diference between low, good or high quality videos, and even occurs when playing DVD movies.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. However, your crash report is either missing or challenging to deal with as a ".crash" file. Please follow these instuctions to have apport report a new bug about your crash that can be dealt with by the automatic retracer.

If you are running the Ubuntu Stable Release you might need to enable apport in /etc/default/apport and restart.

If you are using Ubuntu with the Gnome desktop environment - launch nautilus and navigate to your /var/crash directory and double click on the crash report you wish to submit.

I'm closing this bug report since the process outlined above will automatically open a new bug report which can then dealt with more efficiently. Thanks in advance for your cooperation and understanding.

[Mercenary (megaddj)]

Nice comment... as ubuntu crashes totaly therefore doesnt have any bug reports.

[qyron (qyron-global)]

I tried to give has much information has possible, but as the first comment clearly states, I was "put aside".

The machine still gives me this behaviour. Trying to use my PC as a entertaining centre is a nightmare, with the constant and totally random blocks.
It sometimes even blocks when not playing any type of media at all. It simply freezes. And since the only way to get the machine running again is a "cold reboot", no report of crash gets done.

It's a sick cycle.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the issue is not a totem one, whatever an user software do the system should not freeze and the description lists vlc as doing the same, that's likely either a xorg or linux bug

[qyron (qyron-global)]

Then, if this is so, how to diagnose the problem?

I've been fighting with this since Ubuntu 7.04 - then, the system wouldn't even be usable. It would block between 5 and 30 seconds after starting.

[Josh Hill (ingenium)]

I'm also having the same problem. It happens with Totem, VLC, and MPlayer. It doesn't matter if I play audio or video, the system hangs as soon as the program is opened. The mouse cursor still moves, but the system is otherwise unresponsive, even to Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

This used to happen only once in a while, but now happens consistently every time since the latest xorg update. I haven't seen it hang if I disable compiz, so maybe it's an issue with that? I use the intel (945GM) drivers.

[qyron (qyron-global)]

Whatever it's affecting my system, it doesn't matter if there is Compiz running.
I've seen it hang after a fresh clean installation. I've seen it hang with Compiz installed and without it.
The most obvious thing I notice is that it hangs when playing any kind of media - be it music or video - in whatever format I can think of.

When Ubuntu 7.04 came out, I tried to install it. Then it was a nightmare; it took from 5 seconds to 2 minutes for the entire system to block completely. With the current version, I can work with the system (office applications, torrent clients, etc) but I simply can't use it as an entertainment centre. Which is a little annoying...

I'm running it on a MSI laptop, with a nVidia card.

[Wisnu Wiradana (bhanthenzzz07)]

Is this stupid bug doesn't solved yet ?

[Ayush (sharmayush)]

No crash reports. How to overcome this bug?

[Syed Imran (savierra)]

I tried Movie Player (gstreamer), Movie Player (Xine), MPlayer Movie Player and VLC. Still get the random system freeze. Like others, I have no crash report.