The VideoLAN Forums

OK I'm new at this, so patience please.
I start to watch movies that I have down loaded.
All is good, than picture freezes but sound keeps going,
just like the ever ready bunny!!
Can some one please help me with this.
I am totally clueless.
thanks much

I'm experiencing the same issue. When playing my videos with the new VLC 0.9.8a, the one with the new interface. The video freezes on a single frame and the audio keeps playing. I have to seek the stream and pause and play it to get it back to normal. It's happening on Windows XP on XviD videos.

I am seeing this also with VLC 0.9.8 on Mac OSX 10.5.5.

The source material is ripped DVDs. If I just play the movie there is no freeze. But if I skip (shift-right) or use the keys for next/prev chapter then on some movies it might do the video-freezes-audio-plays-on thing. Other movies seem to never do it.

The location of a freeze is random - if I jump to a location and start skipping and get a freeze, trying again might skip right over that spot.

After a skip the playback may be jerky. If playback is smooth after a skip it will not freeze. If playback is jerky then it might freeze within 1-3 seconds, otherwise it continues jerky playback. If I skip again, start over - it might be smooth this time or jerky...

When video freezes it is has the appearance of demosiac junk, as though the decoder processed some garbage and some good data. The intended image can be recognized but it is badly smeared and blocky.

Whenever it freezes I can change the deinterlace setting and video starts playing again. I assume the video decoder resyncs correctly with input stream.

I'm glad [or sad] to see that I am not the only one having these problems. I have had the exact same problems that the previous posters have all had [I'm running XP]. So now we are waiting for help, I presume.

I can only add that I have been using--and loving--the VideoLAN player for a long time, since it almost first was available. And in all that time, I have NEVER had any similar problems until the releases that began (I think) in early 2008. And every version since then has given me problems. I hope the experts will respond to our pleas for help with specific advice, and soon.

I have the same problem. Annoys the crap out of me, cause VLC has always been bug free and perfect in many ways, and now I have to use inferior players. Hoping for a solution..

It would probably help the developers quite a bit to say what kinds of files or media freeze, and what version(s) of VLC were used.

There are two other questions I think would be useful to answer:

1. If you just let it play from the beginning without doing anything in VLC, does it freeze? In my case I need to skip or step to next chapter to get a freeze or jerkiness.

2. After a freeze does changing deinterlace mode unfreeze and continue playback, or is there another way to unfreeze?

Problems in 3rd party decoder library VLC uses might be hard to fix. But if deinterlace change always fixes it then perhaps the VLC developers could temporarily hack skip and chapter step to be more like setting deinterlace mode as a temporary thing to get around problems in the 3rd party decoders. Such a hack isn't likely to be interesting unless it gets around a lot of people's problems, not just mine, so try it and post your results...

I have the same problem as well, my video doesn't freeze all the time but i'd say its about 70% of the time.

I find that it happens when i'm playing .divx files.

The movie can play all the way through if i don't try and move the slider. However, if i move the slider there is a chance that the video freezes and the sound continues, i can unfreeze the image by pressing either the fastforward/slower button. By doing that then putting it back to normal speed the video fixes and plays fine.

Hope this gets fixed as vlc is just to good to go back to something else.

1. Yes, if I play it form the beginning it does freeze at some point and the sound continues. Sometimes the image just stalls for some seconds and then start again, other times it just freezes up completely.

I´m mostly watching Xvid movies.

2. I don't know what deinterlace mode is. The only thing that works is to close VLC and restart and place the slider where it stopped and continue watching from there until next freeze.

I have had the problem with the releases of approximately whole 2008 like poster: RadPat.

Thanks

I have the same problem as well. The video freezes for me whether I am watching a movie straight through or skipping around, and it does it in random places after a few minutes of playing each time. It does not fix itself, I have to adjust the screen size for the video to continue.

Same for me, I believe it's a key framing issue.

When you seek to a certain part in the movie, there isn't enough information there for VLC to construct a complete image, and thus it continues to play audio until it reaches the next key frame. The earlier versions of VLC (from what I assume) used to back track and reconstruct the frame you seeked to, the newer ones do not, and yes it's annoying.

To see this for yourself, seek to a part of the movie where the video freezes. The audio will keep going, but as soon as VLC reaches a key frame, it'll start streaming the video again.

I have the same problem. If this problem can't be solved, it is reason enough for me not to use VLC anymore. Is there a log file I can post or other info I can provide that can help solving this problem?

Hi
Yes this is really annoying in the new 0.9.x version
Why is this?i dont see a benefit of this change.

Please fix this

Please fix this

GIve us samples+test case.

While playing a South Park DVD, I always get the same problem. happens around the beginning of another episode, sometimes 2 or 3 episodes into the DVD. The error i get is,

"[00000523] main decoder error: decoder is leaking pictures, resetting the heap"

This error is displayed in the debug logging over and over while the picture is frozen yet the sound is still playing.

I had the same issue however I reinstalled and it corrected itself.

This is what the debug log says when it happens (set it at level 2): Note that the moment the video freezes appears to be random: when I restart VLC, it plays the moment it froze before without any problem.

This is not the only thread for this problem, obviously it's a big deal.
Why are VLC trying to brush it off?
Guys, I've re-installed this latest version 3 or 4 times now, and I'm still getting the problem.
NEVER had it with previous versions of VLC.
The biggest pisser is that HD download AVI files simply won't play for more then 5 minutes or so,,,,
moreover even though I re-installed version 8.6 VLC; I still had the same trouble, so VLC must of left behind some files on my computer which link up with the older version I guess.
I am not a tech-head by any stretch so I'm not able to give you threads or logs or describe what I'm saying here in any greater techie way.
But please VLC we use you because you (used to be) are simple and easy and good, there is obviously a big problem here, please treat it with urgency and seriousness.
My regards to you all

I've had this problem when seeking video files. I did have the problem prior to 0.9 but it was very rare, now the problem happens quite a bit. I'm using VLC 0.9.8 on a intel Mac Mini. I believe I may have fixed the problem though, at least for myself.

Go to preferences, change to advance
Input/Codes -> other codecs -> FFmpeg
Uncheck the first "Hurry Up" (this features allows partial decoding of frames and may cause distortion)
Now restart VLC.

With this feature off I get significant improvement when seeking. On a file I use to get the video freeze every time, I now get it 1/10 times and the freeze is very short. I actually have been using mplayer quite a bit since 0.9 but I'll be going back to my favorite video player now that video doesn't freeze every time I seek.

I just tried that, but the frame-freeze still happens.

I just tried that, but the frame-freeze still happens.

After some further testing, I notice H.264 videos still freeze some but xvid and divx don't freeze anymore. I wonder if it's a codec problem then.

I just tried that, but the frame-freeze still happens.

After some further testing, I notice H.264 videos still freeze some but xvid and divx don't freeze anymore. I wonder if it's a codec problem then.

Hm.. I don't agree. I keep having these problems with XVid. I downloaded SMPlayer (that also uses libavcodec), but played too few video's to conclude that it doesn't have the problem. I'll keep you posted.

Im getting these problems too, specificlly with two certain videos, one being MKV, the other MP4


I tried the skip looping H264 method, and it worked for the most part on the MKV vid, now it only freezes up at one part for only like 2 seconds rather than a long amount.



However, this hasnt fixed the MP4 video.


My specs are 2.8Ghz Processor with 1GB RAM on Windows XP


and my Player version is 0.8.6c

Yeah - seems to be that this is a common issue with the new player - I'm using the latest release (0.9.8c) and hadn't had this issue with the previous version I was using -(0.8.6i)- and have just noticed it starting to occur during playback - only seems to occur later in the playback (i.e about 3/4 the way thru an hour episode) - using it to play iso. files which normally is handled fine with vlc.. may have to try a reinstall or rollback to a previous version..Which is disappointing as I noticed that the earlier version I was using would have small pause/skip moments in playback - not to a loss of video or audio, which didn't seem to happen as much in the newer version. When using divx player, these sorts of issues were usually related to the video being encoded with a codec that the player did not fully recognize (3rd party etc) - is it possible to add more codecs to vlc? Hopefully all these related posts will warrant a new release soon?

I am having a similar issue with Vlc, version 0.9.8a. We are trying to play DVD's bought in America. Most of them are dual-layer, copy-right protected and all that, but when we play them the sound and the pictures are all broken up. We do not have this issue with every DVD, but the ones we've bought most recently have done this besides two. I can't figure out if it's the player or our DVD drive or something to do with the region codes because European DVDs will play fine.
This is the message we get main info: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
a52 info: A/52 channels:2 samplerate:48000 bitrate:192000
and we have also gotten the message
decoder is leaking pictures resetting the heap.

What can we do?

Wow! I rolled back (as I think it's called) to version 0.8.6 and WA-LA- no problem. The DVDs from America play fine. Just for information.