Bug 1174046

Summary: VLC will happily run once, but ignore attempts to play a 2nd video. process cannot be killed, needs a restart.
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE Tumbleweed Reporter: Jedi Beeftrix <jedibeeftrix>
Component: X11 ApplicationsAssignee: Dominique Leuenberger <dimstar>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Major    
Priority: P5 - None CC: a, i, jedibeeftrix
Version: Current   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86-64   
OS: SUSE Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Jedi Beeftrix 2020-07-12 08:15:25 UTC 
Background:
Started noticing the problem on a media PC back in April, it was an old PC that had hardware problems that caused it to restart randomly, so I didn't want to attribute it to TW.

But since the PC has died i have repurposed an old acer AMD kabini SFF box into the same role, and its doing the same thing:

Behavior:
Start PC > Navigate to video folder > Double-click on file and hey-presto - it opens and plays fine in VLC.
Come back a while later wanting to play another video... and double-clicking on a video file and there is no response from the system.
Doesn't seem to matter whether VLC was left open on the desktop, or had been closed to the system tray, VLC did not respond at all.
Right-clicking on the system tray to maximise the client and then using VLC ui to navigate to a file doesn't work either.
So, close VLC and open again? That doesn't work. Right-clicking on VLC in the taskbar or system tray to "quit" does not generate a response. Opening ksysguard and attempting to kill the VLC process has no effect either; no error message, request apparently processed fine, but no effect either.
If I restart the PC we're back to square one; it will open a video fine, but no guarentee it will open another after that.

Hardware:
Old PC = Haswell/Z87 system using an R7 270x 2gb card
'New' PC = Acer AMD Kabini SFF box

Software:
Old PC = TW - but not entirely sure how i set up the proprietry codecs
'New' PC= TW - codecs setup as directed on the opensuse forums

Is there a chance this is just quirky behaviour on old and poorly supported hardware, and that a modern AMPGPU APU setup would have no such issues?

Kind regards. Jbt
Comment 1 Jedi Beeftrix 2020-08-16 08:52:55 UTC 
n.b. While the title says "2nd video" and the body-text says "come back later", it is instructive to point out that I can often play a number of videos one after the other, it is the ill-defined "come back later" that is the problem.

after enough (?) time has passed we reach this stage called 'later' whereupon vlc has achieved a state of unresponsiveness...
Comment 2 Pavel Artemyev 2020-09-28 13:04:55 UTC 
Same thing. Also happens with music playback.
Comment 3 Yunhe Guo 2020-10-02 13:26:59 UTC 
My step to reproduce:

1. Open a video or audio file in VLC.
2. Close VLC BEFORE it finish.
3. Open another video or audio file in VLC.

Then you cannot open video or audio files until you kill the zombie process.

My workaround:

1. Open a video or audio file in VLC.
2. Click the "Stop" button, and then close VLC.
3. Open another video or audio file in VLC.

Then you should be able to play other video or audio files normally.

Every time you have to stop playing first and then quit VLC.
Comment 4 Yunhe Guo 2020-10-20 17:23:52 UTC 
It seems fixed. Working fine in Tumbleweed. Can you guys double check?
Comment 5 Pavel Artemyev 2020-10-20 17:43:07 UTC 
Yes, I can't reproduce the issue anymore.
zypper se -isx vlc
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...

S  | Name | Type    | Version      | Arch   | Repository
---+------+---------+--------------+--------+------------------
i+ | vlc  | package | 3.0.11.1-5.3 | x86_64 | Pacman_Tumbleweed
Comment 6 Pavel Artemyev 2020-10-20 17:43:18 UTC 
Yes, I can't reproduce the issue anymore.
zypper se -isx vlc
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...

S  | Name | Type    | Version      | Arch   | Repository
---+------+---------+--------------+--------+------------------
i+ | vlc  | package | 3.0.11.1-5.3 | x86_64 | Pacman_Tumbleweed
Comment 7 Yunhe Guo 2020-10-21 09:24:39 UTC 
Closing it for now. If anyone can still reproduce it with latest Packman packages, please reopen it.