The VideoLAN Forums

Dear all,

I am a newbie to VLC and I really need your help.
My OS is Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. For some reason I have to play VLC(version 0.99a with Jaunty) only with X (without GNOME Desktop). That means I start VLC in console as follows:

#export DISPLAY=:0.0
#X&
#metacity&
#vlc

Then VLC starts as normal and it can play videos. But when I click the "close" button on the VLC video window, VLC will quit abnoramally and I can see "Segmentation fault" on the console output.

This will not happen when playing VLC with GNOME Desktop.

My questions is that how it happens? I did not have problems when start other players without GNOME Desktop.
Do I forget some important procedures to play vlc sucessfully with X?

It would be much appreciated if anybody can give me some clues or suggestions. Thanks for your patient.

The old VLC X11 plugins are slightly buggy. This was fixed in version 1.1.0.

The old VLC X11 plugins are slightly buggy. This was fixed in version 1.1.0.

Thanks for your suggestion!

I haven't try vlc 1.1.0 till now (I haven't download the sources yet for my network lag). But I thought I have spotted how the issue happened. That was caused by ALSA audio output. When VLC quits, the alsa audio output thread can't quit for some reason, cause errors when other related threads quit. If I change the audio output to oss, the segfault will never happened.

So the temporary method is to disable alsa and use another audio output driver. Though I still do not know 1) why alsa thread fails to quit 2)why it would never happen with GNOME desktop.

I will try vlc 1.1.0 later. Thanks again!

Before compiling 1.1.0, you might want to try a vlc 1.0.2 package from a PPA (c-korn, motumedia) or from karmic

My vlc crashed suddenly and doesn't work at all. Everytime i invoke vlc in my ubuntu(9.10) it says segmentation fault and doesnt open. How do i get vlc running again.

By the way i am using vlc1.0.02 from ubuntu repositories

The most common reason for immediate crashes are corrupt plugins in the plugins directory. Deinstall VLC, verify that /usr/lib/vlc does not exist anymore, reinstall VLC, and run: