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I use VLC media player to play short video clips in various formats (e.g. mpeg, mp4, wmv). I've never had a problem until I upgraded to LL 5.0. At least once almost every day VLC seems to get stuck. It won't play any videos. The pattern seems random. VLC will always play the first video but it might get stuck on the second video and will remain stuck until I reboot or log off and log back on. Or it might get stuck on the tenth video. When it gets stuck it does nothing. The VLC app doesn't open and I don't get any error messages.
When I was running LL 4.X I never had this problem. I don't know if it might be LL 5.0 causing the problem or perhaps VLC media player. The VLC version is 3.0.9.2. I don't know if VLC media player for LL 5.0 is a different version than VLC for LL 4.X.
When I'm playing video clips I'm not multitasking and no other apps are open or running. No internet browser is open. I have half a dozen laptops running LL 5.0 and I have the same problem on each one.
When VLC got stuck I used Task Manager to look at the processes that were running, but nothing jumped out at me. Even when VLC is playing a video normally I can't find a process with the letters "VLC" in it.
Thanks.
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09-23-2020, 01:22 AM
(This post was last modified: 09-23-2020, 01:24 AM by gitsum.)
VLC is a wonderful tool for playing music, videos, recording and a dozen other functions. I have used it before, but found I just didn't use all of those extra functions.
I use a simple music player (Audacious) and a simple movie player (MPV). I am a minimalist at heart and try to keep all software as small and simple as possible.
I have no solution for you other than perhaps removing VLC and trying something different?
Maybe some clean up tweaks?
sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoremove
"Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money."
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Thanks gitsum, but I actually use several of "those extra functions" with VLC. In fact there are a couple of things VLC can't do that I wish it could do, not that I do anything fancy that would require a serious video editing app.
As a possible solution to my problem, I'm going to try at least a couple of alternate players. Since you mention Audacious I'll take a look at it. The reason I've been using VLC over the years is simply a matter of it being the most common open-source player, but as I said I've also grown fond of some of its extra functions. I've even installed VLC for people on Windows 10 machines because sometimes the proprietary players that come preinstalled are terrible. For that matter, I've installed LibreOffice on many Windows 10 machines because of the ridiculous pricing and licensing for Office.
Yet another alternate solution is to revert back to LL 4.8 on my laptops. It wouldn't be the first time I've decided to revert to an earlier release to fix a problem. Reverting to 4.8 would also reduce my boot time by 30 seconds. But I don't like going backwards.
Yet another approach is to dig in a little deeper. For example, I could attempt to identify the process(es) that are running when VLC is running. When it gets stuck I could look to see if any of those processes are running, which might give me (or an expert) a clue.
Realistically, if I'm the only person that has noticed this problem, I can't expect it to get attention from an expert. :-)
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Whoops, I meant to say I'll try MPV for videos. I very rarely use my Linux machines to play audio files, but now that you mention it I wonder if VLC would get stuck with audio files just like with video files.
