Totem crashes all the system when opening a file

[Jean-Christophe Baptiste]

Totem crashes all the system when opening a file.

So far I can only afirm it happens with divx movies.

When I open the file, the Totem window appears but soon the mouse cursor disapears and my X server crashes.

The screen becomes dark and it is like the X session is infinitely restarting.

It is impossible to take back the control of the system - no key responds, even CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE - and the only way to get out of this is to hard reboot, which could be painful for the file system.

I can tell the same problem appear before when I was on a different OS : Suse Linux 10.

So the problem doesn't concern only Ubuntu.

And it happens either on Gnome or KDE.

Of course, in such a situation I don't get any error message - or I don't know how to get it.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Best regards,

Jean-Christophe Baptiste

[Jean-Christophe Baptiste (jc-baptiste)]

Sorry, I forgot to tell two more things :
 - it occurs either with xine or gstreamer
 - I can find a reason why it happens and can't find a way to reproduce it for sure (seems random)

[Julien Olivier (julo)]

I can confirm this behaviour on my Dapper too. As Jean-Christophe said, it seems to only happen when playing DIVX, and to randomly crash the system. When it doesn't crash the system, only totem crashes and displays an X error in the terminal (something like "bad match"). I don't have the exact error message because I can't take the risk to crash my system right now. If you really need it, ask me and I'll try to reproduce it later.

[Julien Olivier (julo)]

Here's the error message I get when the system doesn't crash:

julien@lifebook ~/Desktop $ totem leaftag-gimmie.avi
The program 'totem' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)'.
  (Details: serial 49 error_code 11 request_code 141 minor_code 19)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The BadAlloc issue is probably bug #35229

[Jean-Christophe Baptiste (jc-baptiste)]

Definitely not. Just this evening, for the first time, Mplayer presented the same behavior. Mouse control lost, permanent access to the hard drive, black screen and then mouse cursor appearing and disappearing.
No way to take back the control, just reboot.
Doesn't it look like a memory leak (filling up the swap) ?
But from what, I have no idea and don't know how to search. Any idea ?
Maybe the only point I have with the other bug is the video card : the i915 of my laptop.
It is so exasperating, every time I open a movie I feel I am playing a kind of death lottery with my file system.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

If that happens with gstreamer xine mplayer that's not a totem issue but rather an xorg, driver or linux one. What is the exact reference of your video card? Could you attach you /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log? Do you have anything to /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog about that?

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

There's two errors here:

  (a) bug #35229, Totem not coping with BadAlloc and just dieing.
  (b) bug #28326, the i810 having Xv support that gets itself into knots and crashes.

[Jean-Christophe Baptiste (jc-baptiste)]

The bug #28326 absolutely matches the problem I encountered.

Since I upgraded my system to Dapper, it hasn't appeared anymore.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

So this bug is a duplicate of #35229/#28326?

[Jean-Christophe Baptiste (jc-baptiste)]

Not 35229.

It is a duplicate of 28326, sorry.

And to the contrary of what I said, it reappeared on Dapper.