mplayer uses enormous ammount of memory when ASS fonts are displayed

[Petar Velkovski]

Binary package hint: mplayer

When movies are played with ASS fonts enabled like with this command:

mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau -ass -embeddedfonts The\ Girl\ Who\ Leapt\ Through\ Time.mkv

mplayer uses huge amount of RAM memory. The same problem appears both with fonts built into the video stream and also when using external .srt fonts when they are transcended to ASS by mplayer.

I believe this is a regression because i have never had this problem with mplayer in Lucid or in previous versions of Ubuntu.

lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 10.10
Release: 10.10

apt-cache policy mplayer
mplayer:
  Installed: 2:1.0~rc4~try1.dsfg1-1ubuntu1
  Candidate: 2:1.0~rc4~try1.dsfg1-1ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 2:1.0~rc4~try1.dsfg1-1ubuntu1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick/universe i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: mplayer 2:1.0~rc4~try1.dsfg1-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.36-0.1~xorgedgers1-generic 2.6.36-rc6
Uname: Linux 2.6.36-0-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Oct 8 01:43:59 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Alpha i386 (20100831.2)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: mplayer

[Chen Tao (pro711)]

This bug also affects me. I believe there is a memory leak in libass.
This bug is introduced in Maverick because I don't have similar problems in Lucid.

[Petar Velkovski (pvelkovski)]

I tried removing libass in order to see what other packages would be removed. Synaptic says that removing libass would also remove VLC but not mplayer.

Since this memory leak is not present in VLC, I think that we can't blame libass.
Maybe mplayer uses it's own internal version of libass that is problematic.

[Petar Velkovski (pvelkovski)]

Ok I just visited libass hosting site. It's hosted on http://code.google.com/p/libass/.
The release notes for version 0.9.11 says:
 * Fix serious memory leaks
 * Reduce frame/drawing initialization overhead

In Maverick we have version 0.9.9.

[Chen Tao (pro711)]

Yes, I think it's the internal version of libass mplayer uses that causes the problem. I tried to replace the internal version of libass with version 0.9.11 but mplayer won't compile after that. Maybe mplayer uses a customized version of libass.

[Chen Tao (pro711)]

On my machine, the memory leak occurs only when using vdpau output. If xv output is used, everything is fine. ASS rendering works perfectly without memory leak.

[Daniel Ohlsson (bdevilord)]

I am using Ubuntu 10.10 amd64. The memory leak happens when i run mplayer with vdpau output and video files with ASS subs.

[quickridge (amhankin)]

Also affects me only when using ASS subs and vdpau video at the same time. (Ubuntu 10.10 amd64)

[Petar Velkovski (pvelkovski)]

As the original reporter of this bug, I also confirm that this bug appears when mplayer is used with the vdpau backend.

[Petar Velkovski (pvelkovski)]

I just found out that this is actually NVidia driver bug. I am not sure in what specific version of the driver this bug was fixed, but after updating few minutes ago the driver using ubuntu-x-swat ppa to 260.19.26 beta (https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa) there is no memory leak any more.

Can some of the other posters give it a try so that we can close this bug as invalid?

[Shish (shish)]

I've found that upgrading my mplayer which was using libass 0.9.9 to current svn which is using 0.9.11 has fixed the problem, without changing my driver at all

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

sounds plaubsible. keeping this bug assigned mplayer because it uses an internal copy