VLC 3.0 - seek trouble and ghost play

[sling-shot]

I have recently updated VLC to 3.0 from Play Store. After the update I have the following 2 issues:

1. While watching any video, I tend to speed up play by skipping through boring parts few seconds at a time. This will be mostly in single digit seconds also variable. In all versions before this, once I swipe a few millimeters and release my fingers, the video will skip seconds accordingly and play the next part. In this release if the swipe is small in movement say worth 2 or 3 seconds, the video goes back a second or two and plays from that point. This makes the whole exercise of swiping moot as it just leads to repeating the same part of the video instead of forwarding.

2. I have been observing something like ghost play of some random old video that was played by selecting from Piktures gallery or MiXplorer file explorer. (As those two are my primary apps). At random times such as end of a call, connecting to the car bluetooth system, locking and unlocking of screen etc. the old video starts playing by itself with no user input. Please note that this happens when VLC is not in the notification panel and the video was first played days or even weeks before. After some unknown random time, a newer random video gets into this slot and keeps up this. This does not happen always, does not happen in a reproducible manner too. This particular behaviour was seen even in the previous version too not only 3.0.

I am on Android 7.0 not-rooted Sony stock ROM and the phone is Xperia Z3+ single SIM variant.

[sling-shot]

I did some more testing about the seek difficulty.

When I touch the screen and swipe right to seek forward, an onscreen display shows the target position but the actual play (as shown in the player control slider and picture on screen) starts much before (probably even before what was visible on the screen when touched).

For eg. when the video is at 3 min 1 second if I seek to 3 min 8 seconds as shown in the pop-up display, the slider at the bottom of the screen will still be at 3 min 1 second or something and start playing only from there.

[billd]

I am seeing something similar on a Moto 5g. When I drag to seek forward in an MP4 video, the sound moves forward but the video freezes. When I drag to seek anywhere after that the sound is correct, but the video is frozen. Please fix.

[sling-shot]

I have not noticed the sound thing because I almost always watch videos on mute and with subtitles.

With the later updates, my problem has improved by say 40% but it is still definitely there.

[Dekans]

For precise seeking, deactivate "fast seek" option in settings → video

[DV2FOX]

I am having these issues since i had to update VLC to play properly (Reason: Galaxy S7 updated firmware 2 days ago caused VLC 2.6 to randomly close every 2 minutes, not remembering where it was left at, etc...)

(Disabled the "Double tap sides for -/+10 secs skip" btw)

1.Like the OP said, if i am like at minute 5:00 and do a 3 sec rewind via drag and drop, it'd rewin WAY MORE than normal most of the times.

2.If i was watching a LONG video , 53mins of lenght, and i PAUSE watching it at 15:00, then turn off the phone screen (NOT THE ENTIRE PHONE 100%), bring back the same video, then head to minute 30:00 by swiping my finger at the orange ball in the timeline.. If i press the PAUSE button and resume, the vid would REWIND TO MINUTE 15:00 !!!!...

3.Something not mentioned and i'll add as an extra bug: If i lock the UI, whenever i want to check the player's timeline etc, i tap the screen and it'd INSTANTLY come up... NOW, if the UI is UNLOCKED and you poke the screen, the UI takes just a few miliseconds to dis/appear !..I know many people won't care but...I do.

Hopefully the VLC team can hear us and do something about it...I already sent an e-mail that's shown at Google Play Store but hey, no reply!

[sling-shot]

For precise seeking, deactivate "fast seek" option in settings → video

Thank you. I will try this out.

Any idea about the ghost videos playing?

[Dekans]

No idea, will dig a bit into this.

[DV2FOX]

Thanks for letting us know that ya gonna look into these issues. (All of 'em from this post)..It's a bit uncomprehensible for the UI part (Lag/delay) but for the ghosting etc...

[sling-shot]

@Dekans @Aza

The issue of ghost play continues to trouble me to date. I have changed my mobile to Xperia XZ1 with Android 9.0 stock unrooted. This happens even if I force stop VLC, reboot the phone etc.

[Aza]

Could you please provide some logs?

Wait for the issue to happen again and then go to: Settings > Advanced > Debug logs. Then share the logs with the sharing service you prefer (Google Drive, Dropbox, pastebin...).

[sling-shot]

https://pastebin.com/YEKsRQVS

Log from today

[Aza]

Unfortunately, there is nothing useful in the logs. At the beginning of the logs, the playback is already started and there is no indication about what launched it.
I tend to think that another app is just launching the last playback. Does this issue also happen with other music apps?

[sling-shot]

I will test it out. I do use Sony's default Music app occasionally, but do not recall encountering this.

How do I produce a clean log? I mean one which has all details.

[Aza]

Probably not easily. An app doesn't have access to the logs of other apps and what could be useful here is the log showing what app starts the playback. The only way I see is by using logcat: https://developer.android.com/studio/co ... ine/logcat

[sling-shot]

OK. I am not a developer hence might not succeed. But I will try to see if I can get anything useful. I have Android Studio installed in my laptop for some long forgotten dream.

I will also check if this behaviour is seen with Sony Music.

[Aza]

Thanks a lot!

[sling-shot]

Unfortunately now I am unable to reproduce this behaviour. However I have setup USB debugging on the phone, updated Android Studio and successfully connected the phone and can see the log live. Will wait for the aberrant behaviour to reappear and then will collect the log and update here.

[sling-shot]

After all these days, it happened again today around 5 pm. I reached home around 10 pm, connected Android Studio. Could not see anything related to VLC during that timeline. But the phone is almost out of storage and is throwing logs of hundreds of lines per minute with many error messages.

After sometime it looks like logs rotated and now I can only see the messages from 10 pm onwards.

And the file VLC was playing was from Jan 01!

I will have to try again if this keeps repeating. I might get a chance to check if this happens with Sony Music too then.