The VideoLAN Forums

Hi,

I have vlc 3.0.6 on Debian testing (buster), running on Intel NUC with Gemini Lake, Intel(R) Celeron(R) J4005 CPU.

I have a playlist with couple hundred clips, ranging from 5 minutes to 90, that gets played back in random order.

Unfortuantely - after couple of movies - sometimes 2, sometimes 4, vlc halts. There is 0 cpu usage, nothing is displayed.

Usually it happens on start of new clip, and the halt is co complete that clip filename that usually gets displayed for couple of seconds - stays on screen.

I run vlc with:

vlc -vv --video-on-top -Z -L -f ftp://some.server/vlc/00-saturday.m3u 2>&1 | ts | tee vlc.log

In another terminal I made screenshot every minute (the video playback is in a room i generally don't go to, so i don't see it all the time).

Based on changes in screenshots, I captured case where playback worked for ~ 3 hours. Vlc ws started at 12:41:05, and "frozen" screenshots started at least at 15:01:01.

Log is available here: https://depesz.com/vlc.log.gz

What can I do to fix the problem? What details can I provide you with so you can help me?

The only way that KILL signal will not work is if the VLC process crashed within a device driver in kernel mode. I doubt that anybody here can debug that sort of problem.

So what are my options now?

Kernel debugging...

While it does make *some* sense, I do recall that couple of months ago it worked OK (but then I reinstalled system on this box, and that could have caused problems). What's more - I seem to recall strace showing that vlc is doing stuff... And it definitely prints information to screen ...

If VLC runs in user mode, then it can be killed.

Tried today, with different playlist.

Ran VLC using:
Log was gzipped and is available to download from my site.

Vlc was started at 10:31:26.

In the mean time, every minute, I was taking screenshot of display. From 10:38:36 screenshots stopped changing.

I discovered it around 10:46 and took strace from vlc process, using:
Killed strace after ~ 30 seconds, and log is here.

3 files were played:

• at 10:31:28 : /media/MEDIA/music-videos/Nickelback/Nickelback Dark Horse Tour Video - Drum Tech - lK3TzRC7FBM.mkv
• at 10:33:06 : /media/MEDIA/music-videos/Korn/Jonathan Davis And The SFA - 'Alone I Break' live - CbnQMgzJIFo.mkv
• at 10:38:07 : /media/MEDIA/music-videos/Korn/Korn - Next In Line (Official Audio) - 28HvfNtCVNk.mkv

"ffprobe" output for them is on my site.

At the end, screen was showing this image.

Interestingly - in todays case I was able to Ctrl-C vlc. Not sure what it changes, but that's how it looks today. But previous run, also with this playlist, ended up in "no-ctrl-c/no-kill" scenario, but then, strace.log was very short, and was not adding new lines there, so I assume it was kernel issue. Don't have the logs from this case, though.

You can also see my config files:

• vlcrc
• vlc-qt-interface.conf

Hope that it will help, as I'm definitely out of ideas.

And one more try, this time it ended in situation when I can't ctrl-c or normally kill vlc. Only kill -9 worked.

To make debugging even simpler I ran strace in a loop:
All files are available for download:

• all.straces.tar.gz - this is 18MB tarball, and on unpack it takes ~ 130MB.
• ffprobe.output.txt.gz
• final.screenshot.scaled.png
• vlc.log.gz

try with --no-audio

In this thread, you have reported three different problems. It's way too confusing to help you TBH.

[*]at 10:31:28 : /media/MEDIA/music-videos/Nickelback/Nickelback Dark Horse Tour Video - Drum Tech - lK3TzRC7FBM.mkv

I think I found the problem. Maybe a new selection of music?

try with --no-audio

Tried. Actually I was doing almost all my tests with noaudio.

In this thread, you have reported three different problems. It's way too confusing to help you TBH.

Not sure how these are three problems. The problem for me is: I can't play playlists because vlc freezes. Sometimes (very, very rarely) I can kill it, but usually I have to kill -9.

I showed 3 cases to make it clear that the problem does not stem from single broken file.

I have another case. I plan on adding new cases when possible, so that perhaps some pattern will emerge. If that's a problem, let me know, I'll stop.

In here, the important part is that CTRL-C did work.

Command ran:

• VLC started: 2019-02-11 09:38:21
• VLC failed a bit before: 10:20:00

Files with debug data:

• all.straces.tar.gz - this is 31.18 MB tarball, and on unpack it takes ~ 212 MB.
• ffprobe.output.txt.gz
• final.screenshot.scaled.png
• vlc.log.gz