VLC Freezing Ubuntu 20.04

Question

I have a big problem with ubuntu 20.04 and vls. Unfortunately, this is the best player for Linux, and I use it for work (video analysis, etc.). After some time of viewing the video at 4x or 8x speed, the system freezes up tightly. Sometimes i can move the mouse, sometimes even this is not available. I cannot call the terminal, I cannot boot into the terminal, or do anything else like use xkill. The graphical shell, as it were, dies completely. How to solve this problem? I already disabled decoding - didn't help Chose different output devices - did not help Please help, this is terrible. And I did not find another good player ...

Answer 1

I was running into a similar problem, but with using the python bindings for VLC along with embedding the players within widgets for PyQt5. My version of VLC was installed using the apt-get. My current version of VLC is the

$ vlc --version
VLC media player 3.0.9.2 Vetinari (revision 3.0.9.2-0-gd4c1aefe4d)
VLC version 3.0.9.2 Vetinari (3.0.9.2-0-gd4c1aefe4d)
Compiled by buildd on lgw01-amd64-060.buildd (Apr  9 2020 19:29:44)
Compiler: gcc version 9.3.0 (Ubuntu 9.3.0-10ubuntu2)
This program comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
You may redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License;
see the file named COPYING for details.
Written by the VideoLAN team; see the AUTHORS file.

TL;DR

Switching my graphics driver from nouveau to the proprietary stable release of NVIDIA seemed to do the trick from this post!

Lengthy Text

My problems arose when I attempted to have client video playback of two video streams over the network from one system to the other, both of which used PyQt5. A quick and dirty solution was to launch a remote session with ssh and X11, which worked, but was inefficient. The next step was to disable Wayland and force my Ubuntu 20.04 to use Xorg as its display server as mentioned from this post. When there were only two streams, this worked perfectly! When I set it to something higher like 10, the entire screen became frozen, and I couldn't see my mouse or keyboard input. To resolve this issue, I had to power cycle my computer. Eventually I found that I could remote into the system via ssh and use pkill to terminate my python process:

sudo pkill -9 python3

and restart my display manager with the command:

sudo systemctl restart display-manager.service

My system has an NVIDA graphics card, and the solution for me was to switch from using the nouveau drivers to the latest and tested NVIDIA driver. I had a hunch it might be my graphics driver when I would see the error display with my video media widget playets attempted to play the vifeos, followed by core dumps:

kernel: [  898.509371] nouveau 0000:73:00.0: fifo: PBDMA0: 00040000 [PBENTRY] ch 3 [03fe85b000 Xorg[1939]] subc 0 mth                                                d 0000 data 00000000 

I was able to determine my NVIDIA driver by running the command:

lspci | grep -i nvidia
0000:73:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation TU104GL [Quadro RTX 5000] (rev a1)
0000:73:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation TU104 HD Audio Controller (rev a1)
0000:73:00.2 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation TU104 USB 3.1 Host Controller (rev a1)
0000:73:00.3 Serial bus controller [0c80]: NVIDIA Corporation TU104 USB Type-C UCSI Controller (rev a1)

In my case, the system is using Quadro RTX 5000 from my output.

Following this post, I decided to go the non terminal route and switch over drivers and selecting the proprietary,tested option. Now I can stream 10 videos with no issues.

Answer 2

I had a problem with VLC freezing on NVIDIA (proprietary driver, 535). Disabling the hardware accelerated decoding under

Preferences > Video > Input/Codec > Codec

did the trick for me.