VLC plugin is making Firefox crash

[Chris Coulson]

Upstream have just made me aware of a spike in Firefox crashes from Ubuntu users since 11.10 released last week. Unfortunately, the traces aren't very useful as we don't submit symbols for non-firefox code, but the crashes have a 100% correlation with the VLC plugin being installed:

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/list?signature=libc-2.13.so%400x10fc79

(there are 277 crashes in 1 week, as of the moment I reported this bug).

Here's a snapshot of comments from reporters:

"VLC Multimedia Plug In is what makes it crash!"

"trying to watch a video clip mp4 online."

"trying to download audio files. This time and MP3 but previous crashes with RA and WMA streams"

"Try to load WMV-media content on website"

"Just go to this website www.radioonlinethailand.com And then it crash I don't know why??"

"it crashed on mpg files"

"Firefox simply crashes when I try to play this podcast."

"christiananswers.net messiah avi"

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Note, this seems to be x86 specific too. Can anyone recreate this?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=619579 ?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

It's basically impossible for me to judge what this without a PROPER stack trace.

If it's the same bug as Debian #619579, then I have no clue why it is occurring, but suspect a problem between Lua, Firefox and (e)glibc. The crash is deep within Lua and the same code path does not crash within the VLC player.

Note that the Mozilla VLC plugin has been without upstream maintainer for over 3,5 years. (There has been some recent activity in from a Russian company to fix the Windows plugin, but it does not seem to care about Linux/X11.)

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Hmmm, that doesn't sound good. That probably means that the VLC plugin is going to stop working entirely quite soon once Firefox is using multiple content processes, as this won't support running in-process plugins like it does now (and VLC is currently special-cased by Firefox to run in-process because it uses Xt)

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

On Mo, Okt 17, 2011 at 18:22:19 (CEST), Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:

> Note that the Mozilla VLC plugin has been without upstream maintainer
> for over 3,5 years.

That sounds to me as valid reason to stop building the Mozilla VLC
plugin in Debian and Ubuntu. Rémi, what do you think?

--
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

I don't know for I personally never used the Mozilla plug-in ever. I'd say look at your usage statistics.

Anyhow - the Netscape and ActiveX plugins were split out in a separate source package, and removed from VLC versions 1.2.0 onward. So there are no questions that it should eventually be removed from the "vlc" source package. The only question for Debian/Ubuntu is whether to package the Mozilla VLC plugin -separately- or not at all.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

So as it happens, it seems this particular bug is not in VLC.