Comment by jerf
11 days ago
Dying on the exact same frame, or just generally in the same spot?
In the case of the latter my first thought would be thermals. Different video codecs have significantly different decoding costs, and may also stress different parts of your system. You could check for that by playing that same video but not starting at the beginning and see if it's the same duration. Or jump to just before it dies and see if it plays through.
If by "downloaded" you mean The High Seas, those who provision the high seas are often on the cutting edge of using codecs with every last feature turned on to make the videos smaller to squeeze every last bit out of the encodings that they can, which can make them unusually expensive to decode. Or so I've heard.
I didn't get to dig much further into it, but for those of you who suggested ideas:
- not always the same frame. The first three failures were within seconds of each other, possibly the same frame. I tried again the next night and it got through that part of the video, but crashed a minute later - I was able to play the video using a different app (Ubuntu's built-in Videos app from an old Ubuntu release, maybe 20.04)
[dead]
VLC failed on other videos from the same source.
Ubuntu's default player worked. I've rarely used it.
Some bug in VLC with whatever codec these use, and then some system level bug allowing that to kill the whole machine.
1 reply →