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[Partially Solved] System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Vid

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Tony G
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[Partially Solved] System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Vid

#1 Post by Tony G »

I have a fresh install of Debian Stretch. I installed the KDE version using the iso "debian-live-9.3.0-amd64-kde+nonfree". Gnome is also installed, but that is installed only for the tools it adds to the KDE menu.

All is well, except for one Google resistant problem. At the end of certain video file types, when the player should close the file, the system always becomes unresponsive. Every time. The video types are mp4 and avi. Mkv files work fine. All video file types play perfectly, the problem is only at the very end of the file.

These exact same files work without any problem on my old Debian 7.

By unresponsive system, I mean that the mouse pointer won’t move, and most keyboard combinations will not work, such as Ctrl-alt-esc (kill active window), Ctrl+F12 (show desktop), nor the "windows" key (KDE menu).

If I let the system set overnight, it eventually unlocks and I am presented with the log in screen. Not a reboot, but same as if I had let the system set long enough to trigger a log in password.

The only keyboard command I have found that does work is the “Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring” sequence.

Xine is my favorite media player, but the system freezes no matter which player I use. The other two installed players are Dragon and Video.

One important note: VLC player is not installed. Prior to installing Stretch, I had read that lately it is known for causing problems. So I did not install it.

But when I search in Synaptic for VLC, I see six VLC entries installed, but not the actual player itself. The installed VLC packages are:

libvlc-bin
libvlc5
libvlccore8
phonon4qt5-backend-vlc
vlc-data
vlc-plugin-base

I’ve Googled every phrase and keywords I can think of, but I’ve hit a wall. No one else seems to be having the same problem.

Might purging the VLC packages help?

Or is there another solution?
Last edited by Tony G on 2018-01-19 14:25, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Video Files

#2 Post by bw123 »

Might purging the VLC packages help?
It might, but you have to have a backend installed for phonon. You might be able to get rid of all of them easily by purgeing the phonon4qt5-backend-vlc and then apt-get autoremove, or you might have to do it one at a time. The pkg manager aptitude is really good at handling these things.

I have been using a setup with phonon-backend-vlc and phonon4qt5-backend-vlc after getting rid of all the gstreamer backends. I don't really care for gstreamer at all, and from what I understand, upstream kde prefers vlc. You might get a better result doing the opposite, it's very mysterious to me how this setup works and deals with different audio and video hardware. You can also move one backend or the other to a higher priority in the phonon setup.

I haven't had any issues on plasma playing mp4, avi or any other files with dragonplayer or vlc. It could also be an audio issue, even though you see it only on video files.

The answer will probably depend on what you can find out from any relevant log files. Check all the log files you can find for any errors.
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Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Video Files

#3 Post by Tony G »

Might purging the VLC packages help?
You might get a better result doing the opposite,
Interesting thought! If I don’t find a different fix I will try installing VLC player and see what happens. I’m fully backed up with Clonezilla, so I can easily roll back if I need to.

Any log files in particular to check? I looked through var/log and there are quite a lot of them. The most interesting thing I saw on a quick check of several logs was:

Jan 17 20:53:53 [name redacted] org.kde.kded5[3570]: kf5.kded: No X-KDE-DBus-ServiceName found in "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/plugins/kf5/kded/desktopnotifier.so"

It mentions qt5 and the entry is repeated many many times. Googling it, it looks like it is a closed bug that will be fixed in future releases. So, probably not the cause of my problem.

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Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Video Files

#4 Post by stevepusser »

You should have a "vlc" package available. What does

Code: Select all

apt policy vlc
show?
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Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Video Files

#5 Post by sunrat »

bw123 wrote:I have been using a setup with phonon-backend-vlc and phonon4qt5-backend-vlc after getting rid of all the gstreamer backends. I don't really care for gstreamer at all, and from what I understand, upstream kde prefers vlc.
I've done the opposite in the past. No real issues with either but gstreamer supports crossfading audio files whereas vlc doesn't.
I haven't had any issues on plasma playing mp4, avi or any other files with dragonplayer or vlc.
Can play just about anything here although I mainly use MPV for video and DeadBeef for music. This is on siduction w/ Plasma 5.10. Gstreamer backend is default OOTB, no vlc backend in sight.
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Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Video Files

#6 Post by Tony G »

stevepusser wrote:You should have a "vlc" package available. What does

Code: Select all

apt policy vlc
show?
# apt policy vlc
vlc:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 2.2.7-1~deb9u1
Version table:
2.2.7-1~deb9u1 500
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 Packages
500 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates/main amd64 Packages

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Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Video Files

#7 Post by debiman »

all 3 video formats mentioned are container formats; they can contain virtually any codec.
if the current approach doesn't help, a more detailed analysis of the files causing trouble (and those not causing trouble) might help, wrt the codecs.
i can see how painful that will be when the system freezes every time...

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Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Video Files

#8 Post by Tony G »

debiman wrote:all 3 video formats mentioned are container formats; they can contain virtually any codec.
if the current approach doesn't help, a more detailed analysis of the files causing trouble (and those not causing trouble) might help, wrt the codecs.
i can see how painful that will be when the system freezes every time...
Thanks for that.

I went ahead and installed VLC player. Now Xine (my preferred player) locks up at the end of all files, but all the other players (VLC, Dragon, Videos) now all work fine on all the files I have tried.

I may try un-installing and then re-installing Xine. I guess I can live without Xine if I have to. But I know most of the Xine keyboard shortcuts, been using it for many years, and most of all I like the way Xine gets out of the way and lets me enjoy the video.

You’re right about the lock ups, they are definitely a bother. Plus, I think the Raising Elephants drill is not working exactly as it should. I do get a reboot without holding down the power button, but on the boot up there is always the “clearing orphaned inodes” messages, same as if I had just held down the power button.

I may try a full OS reinstall from the standard Gnome disk, then add KDE. The downside is that I’d lose the 10 or so hours I spent on customizing the current install to suit my preferences.

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Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Video Files

#9 Post by bw123 »

I don't remember using xine in a long time, maybe on a live cd years ago. I just took a look at the dependencies if I want to install xine-ui, and it's pretty crazy. On my fluxbox install, which is pretty lean it needs samba? which pulls in a cups lib, cups-common and a lot of other junk...

vlc has it's own issues with dependencies, I have thought about trashing it for good several times. The mpv way of doing things is looking better and better all the time.

It's a media player, what does that have to do with windows networks or printing? Hard to say, but with so many dependencies, how would you find out where the issue is?
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Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at End of Video Files

#10 Post by stevepusser »

bw123 wrote:I don't remember using xine in a long time, maybe on a live cd years ago. I just took a look at the dependencies if I want to install xine-ui, and it's pretty crazy. On my fluxbox install, which is pretty lean it needs samba? which pulls in a cups lib, cups-common and a lot of other junk...

vlc has it's own issues with dependencies, I have thought about trashing it for good several times. The mpv way of doing things is looking better and better all the time.

It's a media player, what does that have to do with windows networks or printing? Hard to say, but with so many dependencies, how would you find out where the issue is?
There's a newer libxine2 in Debian testing, let me try backporting it in my multimedia repo. Maybe that could fix the issue. Xine-ui hasn't had any work on it for years.
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[Partially Solved] Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at End of

#11 Post by Tony G »

Thanks to all who responded, especially bw123, who put forward the suggestion of installing VLC instead of avoiding it.

stevepusser, if you get the new version of Xine backported, please do post here with the URL of the backport. I am hopeful that it won’t be the Mepis servers linked to in your sig. I would be reluctant to mix Mepis repositories on my Debian.

After trying VLC both with subtitled video, and with videos that have multiple language audio, I have decided the VLC is good enough. I still miss Xine’s memorized single key keyboard shortcuts and Xine’s ability to have a semi full screen – no borders or controls but still shows the task manager bar.

I’m marking the topic [Partially Solved].

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Re: [Partially Solved] System Becomes Unresponsive at End of

#12 Post by debiman »

you might want to try mpv (yeah i know, i'm a fanboi).

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Re: [Partially Solved] System Becomes Unresponsive at End of

#13 Post by stevepusser »

The newer libxine2 for Stretch is now in my multimedia backports OBS repo, along with mpv 0.28.0 and vlc 2.2.8 :)

Thinking about adding vlc 3.0~rc6 to the Stretch repo...

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=127574
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Re: [Partially Solved] Re: System Becomes Unresponsive at En

#14 Post by bw123 »

Tony G wrote: I still miss Xine’s memorized single key keyboard shortcuts and Xine’s ability to have a semi full screen – no borders or controls but still shows the task manager bar.
You can reassign the vlc hotkeys, it's easy. Also, 'nvlc' is an ncurses based player that you get along with the full gui. I use it pretty often, especially on fluxbox thru midnight commander, it's very fast but I can't figure out how to set 'play and quit' using nvlc. It gives you a small text based control window, and a separate vid window like you describe. With window rules in your wm you can make it look like whatever you want.
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Re: [Partially Solved] System Becomes Unresponsive at End of

#15 Post by Tony G »

stevepusser wrote:The newer libxine2 for Stretch is now in my multimedia backports OBS repo, along with mpv 0.28.0 and vlc 2.2.8 :)

Thinking about adding vlc 3.0~rc6 to the Stretch repo...

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=127574
Thanks, I will try it. I have a long day tomorrow (40 mile bicycle ride) so it will be Sunday before I get to it.

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Re: [Partially Solved] System Becomes Unresponsive at End of

#16 Post by None1975 »

You can also try Smplayer. Much better than vlc.
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Re: [Partially Solved] System Becomes Unresponsive at End of

#17 Post by Nili »

^ +1 mpv, mplayer2 or Smplayer front-end of these two ahead it is a good suggestion and recommendation.

I use mpv myself right to say I'm delighted with his performance. Or use both Smplayer/VLC, VLC/mpv why not? When one fails, try the other.
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Re: [Partially Solved] System Becomes Unresponsive at End of

#18 Post by stevepusser »

Some applications like Handbrake or Bittorrent clients have options to shut down the system when finished. I think the only player I saw with that was mpc-qt, but maybe it's something in your xine-ui profile that's causing it to lock up. The usual procedure is to find where in your /home they are stored, back them up, and try starting with a fresh, clean profile.
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Re: [Partially Solved] System Becomes Unresponsive at End of

#19 Post by Tony G »

OK, I installed MVP and SMPlayer. Of the two I prefer MVP. But neither of them are Xine.

Additionally, I tried mapping keystrokes to VLC to be more like Xine and I quickly ran into a problem. Xine uses single key keyboard shortcuts to toggle several frequently used settings, like full screen. VLC insists on different keys to turn full screen on and off.

Xine behaves the same after installing MVP and SMPlayer, it still locks up the system at the end of videos. So onward to the backport.

# echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/
home:/stevepassert/Debian_9.0/ /' >
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'

I eventually got Synaptic to accept the backport repository. I’d rather not fully trust (import the key) any third party repository, so my intent was to update Xine and then remove the sources.list entry.

8B48AD6246925553GPG error: http://download.opensuse.org/repositori ... Debian_9.0 Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 164B4655667F68A8The repository 'http://download.opensuse.org/repositori ... Debian_9.0 Release' is not signed.

I appreciate everyone’s efforts, but I will just get have to get used to VLC.

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Re: [Partially Solved] System Becomes Unresponsive at End of

#20 Post by debiman »

it's mpv, not mvp.
and i'm 100% sure you can set the keybinds just the way you're used to with it.

i just looked, xine is still under active development.
i think you should tell them about your problems.

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