gxine skips, plays too fast, freezes

[Matthew Exon]

Sometimes, not always, when I play a video with gxine, it gets horribly confused. It will do one of a) skip a bit b) play far too fast or c) switch off the sound. Generally the sound and video will get out of sync. Often it works absolutely fine. This seems unrelated to the size or quality of the video, some very high quality videos play fine.

[Nicola Ferralis (feranick)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. I have classified this bug as a bug in gxine.

Also, it would be very useful if you could specify what version of Ubuntu you are using and if there is a usage pattern that leads to the problem. Thanks.

[Darren Salt (dsalt)]

This is probably reproducible using other xine-lib front ends; if so (and audio/video problems generally are), so much for picking the right package for the bug report…

[Nicola Ferralis (feranick)]

Well, gxine was mentioned, so that was the reason for the assignment. It would be great if you could test other players using the xine back-end and confirm that the problem is either present there or not. If yes, than the problem is in xine-lib (and thus the bug can be reassigned to xine-libs). if not it is clearly something in gxine.

Feel free to reassign the bug to the most appropriate package, once you know for sure which one is affected.

Thanks again, for helping making Ubuntu better.

[Matthew Exon (ubuntubugs-mexon)]

The same thing happens in xine. In Totem, sometimes the video gets behind the audio, so it pauses, then plays fast to catch up. No doubt my machine (an EEE box) is too slow to keep up, but in totem it's generally watchable and the degradation is fairly graceful. Gxine seems to react to dropped frames by actively speeding things up, making it worse. Rhythmbox often has similar problems when playing music, suddenly stopping and maybe picking up the thread 30 seconds later.

I can't discern any particular pattern to when it happens, but when it does, all videos (and, with Rhythmbox, music) seem to be bad for a while. It doesn't seem to be due to load, I have a status monitor applet and it doesn't show anything in particular happening. (However, when audio or video is playing, the network usage goes to 100%, which I guess is a separate bug.)

Ubuntu 9.04, gxine 0.5.903-4ubuntu1, xine-ui 0.99.5+cvs20070914-2.1~lenny2ubuntu1, libxine1 1.1.16.3-0.

I didn't assign the bug to a package because the bug reporting page doesn't have an option to do so. If it had, I would have assigned it to gxine, because of the utter impossibility of navigating my way through the maze of audio/video libraries, frameworks, front-ends, codecs and servers with which Ubuntu is encrusted. The problem could be anywhere and no diagnostic information bubbles up into user-space. I have 11 packages installed with "xine" in the name alone. How am I supposed to know which package is broken?

[Darren Salt (dsalt)]

Reassigning to xine-lib for now, though given that you say that rhythmbox is having problems (and rhythmbox doesn't use xine-lib), this is looking more like an X problem – I recall something about problems with xserver-xorg-video-intel…