The VideoLAN Forums

Hi all

I spent quite some time today resolving an issue I have while playing flac files with VLC. The machine that runs VLC is a Mac Mini (1.66Ghz Core Duo) with OS X 10.4.8.

While playing a specific .flac-file I noticed that the sound stops playing in between. Only around two or three minutes get played from that around five minutes long sound file. After around two or three minutes the sound output stops and the progress bar in VLC moves quite fast to the end. Afterwards the next song in the playlist gets played.

I tried to play the file with VLC 0.8.5 and branch-20061203 nightly build. I played the file from a HTTP source and a SMB mounted share. Copying the file to the local disk and playing it from there leads to the same error.

The .flac file has been encoded with flac 1.1.2 and compression level 5. I tried to decode the file back to a .wav-file - this one plays fine up to the end.

In the messages log I get the following message:
I also encoded the .wav-file with compression level 9 to a .flac-file. In that case the file plays fine.

Does anyone has any idea what's going wrong here or what I could try to further diagnose the cause of that problem? If needed I could also provide the .flac-file causing the error.

Thanks for your help!

.flac is a raw audio format which does not have any timestamping info, which can be problematic if the file wasn't properly recorder (tempo wise).

This is why you shouldn't use raw audio formats.

I think I have the same problem (on OS X 3.9/PPC, All versions of VLC I have tryed including 0.8.6a). I think I can add more information about the bug:
The end always happend the same place in the flac file. If the place that triggers the error is skipped, it will finish the song like normal. The flacfiles are encoded using the comandline

flac -8 -V -T ARTIST="Artist" -T ALBUM="Album" -T TITLE="title" -T DATE="year" -T GENRE="genre" -T TRACKNUMBER="tracknumber" -T CDDB="cddb" trackX.wav

The files are ripped directly from CD.

This is what messages tells when it happends. (I started to copy a little bit before the error occured)

main debug: audio output is starving (87590), playing silence
main warning: output date isn't PTS date, requesting resampling (-41151)
main warning: audio drift is too big (-125780), clearing out
main warning: timing screwed, stopping resampling
main warning: mixer start isn't output start (-18558)
main warning: buffer is 84447 in advance, triggering downsampling
main warning: resampling stopped after 28109466 usec (drift: -2105)
main debug: EOF reached
macosx debug: input has stopped, refreshing interface
main debug: closing input
main debug: removing module "flacdec"
main debug: removing module "flac"
main debug: removing module "access_file"
main debug: removing module "flacdec"
main debug: thread 34990592 joined (input/decoder.c:191)
main debug: killing decoder fourcc `flac', 0 PES in FIFO
main debug: removing module "s16tofloat32"
main debug: removing module "bandlimited_resampler"
main debug: removing module "auhal"
main debug: removing module "trivial_mixer"
macosx debug: input has changed, refreshing interface
main debug: thread 34565120 joined (input/input.c:412)
main: nothing to play
macosx debug: input has stopped, refreshing interface

I am also having the same problem as sveinung. I have downloaded FLAC files from allofmp3.com and a number of them play to the same spot and then abruptly skip to the end and move on to the next track. The files play correctly in winamp under Windows so this has to be a decoder issue (or at least an inconsistency in the file the decoder should be able to work around).

any solution would be appreciated!

more info. I tried the Cog player and the files that play incorrectly in vlc play fine in cog. So definitely something going on. If you want a sample file, let me know.

Can I just add, Me too.

If I re-encode the FLAC files, everything is fine.