GStreamer/Totem crashes when seeking in H264 video's

After clicking through many download screens I was not able to get a copy of tihs file to test

Same issue with every h264 videos I have tested so far. Totem plays the video normally then a few seconds later it takes a lot of time to respond to keyboard/mouse input then if I don't try to do anything it gets back to its normal behaviour until the next freeze. During the whole test the video is played without any problems. I am trying to determine what's wrong.

Thanks for your bug. Could you get a backtrace?
- gdb totem
(gdb) run
... crash
(gdb) thread apply all bt

Do you have an example not being a 450M zip to point?

The problem only occurs with totem-xine. It works fine with totem-gstreamer.

Hmm, if you can't download that let me give another example then:

Mercurial -> http://www.own-age.com/vids/video.aspx?id=7583 another Quake 3 trick movie, this one is 245 MB, probably still large but 100 MB less than the first example. In the download list, choose the x264 version.

This is a link to good download mirror, I just downloaded it from here and it went fine with a high d/l speed ->
http://quakersnet.sponsored.by.clanserver4u.de/index.php?section=files&action=details&f_id=195&a_id=34&game=3

I should also note that the nature of the problem has changed a bit. That's probably because there have been some updates to gstreamer in the repository since I filed this bug. When I use seeking now, the video is heavily distorted for a few seconds, before returning to normal.

I've identified some other problems as well:

In this movie - http://www.own-age.com/vids/video.aspx?id=7359 - a Doom 3 movie of 25 MB, I do not see the distortion, but I do have the unresponsiveness for a few secs when I'm seeking. Link to a good download mirror -> http://download.levitation-gaming.com/index.php?action=download&fileid=2202

This movie -> http://www.own-age.com/vids/video.aspx?id=7583 (a trailer of a Q3 trick movie, 11 MB) will not play at all. Totem will give the error message "could not decode stream". This is strange because this vid comes in mp4 format, has video encoded with H264 and audio in AAC, just like the movie Mercurial which I mentioned above. Though they use the same format and codecs, Mercurial will play but this movie will not play. Link to a good download mirror -> http://www.own-age.com/vids/mirrors.aspx?id=7583&dlmirror=14390

One more thing, I'm having these problems with GStreamer, I'm not using the Xine backend for Totem.

Sebastien, sorry but I can't seem to figure out how I have to work with gdb to debug it. I open a terminal, I type 'gdb totem', the press Enter, then I type 'run', I press Enter, then it prints some lines in the terminal with (no debugging symbols found), and gives me the option to continue or quit? gdb doesn't even open Totem?

Sander: you have to run "thread apply all bt" after all that happened.

Hmm, that gdb program is quite difficult to use. After I type 'run', I have to keep pressing Return for some timke before it will finally start Totem? That's some strange behavior. But fortunately I managed to do it. Contents of my terminal are copied to a text file which is attached to this post.

However, it seems that it was a lot more difficult for me to get Totem to crash, maybe that is because Totem/GStreamer packages have been updated since I posted this bug? When I tried today the crashes barely occured, but the distortion of the video after seeking is still there all the time.

According to the backtrace that's a crash to gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg. Could you do a debug build of that package to get a backtrace?

A debug build? Not that I don't want to do it, but I have no idea how I would do that. Can I download a debug package from the APT repository, or do I have to compile it myself? What do I need for it?

On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 08:54:42AM -0000, Sander van Loon wrote:
> A debug build? Not that I don't want to do it, but I have no idea how I
> would do that. Can I download a debug package from the APT repository,
> or do I have to compile it myself? What do I need for it?

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash explains how to do it ;)

--
Jérémie

We can upload a dbg version to use for you, what architecture do you use?

Thanks for the link Jeremie, but I'd prefer to download an already compiled package. I'm using i386.

Then I think a nice MOTU can upload a -dbg package as Sebastien suggested :)

After downloading some recent updates for the GStreamer packages in Ubuntu I tried playing some H.264 video files again, and it seems to me that after the recent updates the problem no longer exists. Seeking is without lag now, I have not experienced any crashes anymore, and the distortion in the image after using seeking is gone as well. So I'm closing this.

Looks like the GStreamer team and Ubuntu did a great job in such a short time. When I first reported this bug I expected multimedia to still be hosed in Dapper , but now I'm confident it will be great.

Thank you for the comment and for closing the bug now it's fixed. That has probably be fixed by one of the gstreamer packages updated