The VideoLAN Forums

Hea all, ive been experiencing problems when im playing .mkv files with VLC. The movie start's out perfectly, but about 30 minutes in, video becomes very choppy and sound cuts in and out. When i go to the task manager, it says my memory usage is 100%. it says vlc is using less than 100mb of memory though, which must be wrong since vlc is the only program that causes this.

Any idea what's going on?

There is a tool called Process Explorer that should give you more info about the process that is eating all available memory.

i downloaded the program, and it doesn't say that VLC is slowly eating ram, although the total usage is increasing by about 2MB per sec. the memory is quickly released after i kill VLC.

Does it help, if you change audio and video output modules from VLC?

Nope, i get the same issue with every output module.

I don't experience slowdown, but with MKV files, I've noticed that if I pause the video, and go do something for a few minutes, it will completely freeze my system. It's a hard lock, and I have to press reset in order to regain control. No other media players or applications cause this in my system, and it doesn't seem to happen with other formats in VLC, just MKV. Pretty sure it's fine if I don't try pausing for more than a minute or so. Perhaps it's related to your issue...?

ForgedReality: VLC cannot freeze or crash your system. Bad device drivers or broken hardware can.

Ahku: because VLC doesn't eat the memory, it must be device driver that eats it. Issue only exist with MKV files?

I have the same problem here (I'm using vlc 1.0.0rc3, vista SP2). For example, while playing a 28Mb .mkv file, vlc consumes memory at a rate of ~ 5MB/sec. So by the end of the video (which lasts 1:31 min), I end up with vlc consuming a total of 430MB of memory.

However I have experimented a bit and found out that, if I desactivate the subtitles, the memory leak stops immediatly (it keeps the memory amount it has consumed until then, but it does not grow any longer) and if I put the subtitles back again, the memory leak does not reappear.

I hope this was helpful . If not, I'm ready to give whatever info that would be helpful.

Edit : The leak actually comes back after puting the subtitles back, sorry for the mistake. However I have observed that the leaks grows significantly only when there are subtitles displaying on the screen.

what kind of subtitles are these ?

Codec : ssa
Description: Styled ASS (No Karaoke)

Hope this is what you want to know.

{Edit]: The leak is no longer present with 1.0.0 RC4. Thanks a lot .

i upgraded to rc4, and it played fine for 1 movie, but now it's leaking memory agian. ive tried every other output (None other than default worked), tried turning off subtitles, tried reinstalling it, but the leak is still there.

The strange thing is that when i add up all the memory being used in process explorer, it's far less than the actual usage.

ive tried every other output (None other than default worked), tried turning off subtitles, tried reinstalling it, but the leak is still there.

Subtitles are always parsed. So only thing that really helps is either to remove subtitle .dlls from VLC or use MKVtoolnix and create new file without subtitles.

This is not true. If subtitle tracks are disabled, they should not leak (at least not more than the original leak). I do agree that mkv leaks like a madman in general. The problem however is that to me it seems like these leaks are in libmatroska itself, and not inside VLC.

So there is a leak with MKV? If it's confirmed and known about, that's all i can hope for.

So there is a leak with MKV?

If they use ASS subtitles, yes.