VLC Ubuntu 14.04 and Custom Skin

[EODCrafter]

Hello, I installed the newest version of VLC and Custom skins and when I added custom skin the VLC player no longer works. I'm getting the following error in Terminal...
steve@eodsteven:~$ vlc
VLC media player 2.2.0-git Weatherwax (revision 2.2.0~~git20140409+r56317+122~ubuntu14.04.1)
Segmentation fault
What do I need to do?

[EODCrafter]

Also got this error at one time before uninstalling and reinstalling...vlc: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libvlc.so.5: undefined symbol: pl_Get

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Your VLC is misinstalled.

[EODCrafter]

Your VLC is misinstalled.

Yea no kidding but how come uninstalling with autoclean and autoremove deleting the ppa I got it from, adding the official ppa and reinstalling didn't work?

[erwan10]

Question, do you use virtualbox ?

Actually, I did have the same problem after upgrading from Ubuntu 13.10 to Ubuntu14.04 using virtualbox4.3.10. The faulty library where crash occurs is libtar that vlc uses to open up a skin. This issue seems to be specific to Ubuntu 14.04.Tests with older Ubuntus and Fedora 20 show no such problem.

In debug mode, this seems to be related to SSE2. I suspect for some reason, Ubuntu is mistaken when running inside a Virtualbox machine. I don't know whether it is a bug with Ubuntu or virtualbox not properly advertsing CPU capabilities. Not much can be done at the vlc level.

Code: Select all

(gdb) bt #0 __strlen_sse2_bsf () at ../sysdeps/i386/i686/multiarch/strlen-sse2-bsf.S:50 #1 0xb75b044e in mkdirhier () from /usr/lib/libtar.so.0 #2 0xb75aeb6e in tar_extract_dir () from /usr/lib/libtar.so.0 #3 0xb75aeddc in tar_extract_file () from /usr/lib/libtar.so.0 #4 0xb75b0958 in tar_extract_all () from /usr/lib/libtar.so.0 #5 0xb2423c4b in ThemeLoader::extractTarGz (this=this@entry=0xb2150628, tarFile=..., rootDir=...) at ../../../../modules/gui/skins2/src/theme_loader.cpp:121

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

This has nothing to do with VMs. The same NULL-dereference occurs on bare hardware. It's either a regression in newer libtar versions, or VLC misusing libtar.

[Nicos D]

I fixed mine (Ubuntu 14.04) and reset it to the defaults by typing sudo vlc --reset-config. I agree that it has something to do with the custom skins and nothing else worked until I tried this. I disagree that it's an installation problem as one poster has suggested, it seems to be more of an incompatibility issue. Mine is working now.

You can get help by typing vlc help in terminal and a list of values will pop up for you to browse through if it isn't the same problem I had.

I hope this works for you too.

Nick

[erwan10]

This is a known bug in libtar (libtar0 version 1.2.20-3) shipped by Ubuntu14.04. A fix already exists (1.2.20-4), but it is not yet backported to Ubuntu 14.04. The bug is reported. So hopefully, this should be fixed some time soon. As far as vlc is concerned, the bug only affects the skins2 interface, and no workaround is available. The bug is limited to recent Linux based on Debian, since the bug was introduced by an additional Debian patch to the original 1.2.20 version.

[vbare2]

First you should do is, go to software center and deinstall all of VLC plugins and extension, and VLC also... Type in software center VLC and look what is installed, its very important that you deinstall libvlc.so.5 plugin and all others. Then you can install VLC 3.0 by typing in terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/master-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc

If you have problem with subtitle extension, type in terminal:
wget https://github.com/kraxor/vlsub/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
cd vlsub-master
cp vlsub.lua ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/

That is it!!!!!

[erwan10]

Good news, the fix for the libtar bug mentioned in this thread has been backported to Ubuntu 14.04 and the like.

Just upgrade your OS (sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade) and 'vlc -I skins' will no longer crash at startup.