Reliable version of mplayer?

pickarooney

I've been having a huge amount of crashes with (s)mplayer lately for no apparent reason. I'll be watching a video file and all of a sudden BAM! mplayer exited with error code 1. The file will play again when I restart and will also play with other programs and there's no reliable way to reproduce crashes. The logs don't give anything noteworthy.

I've tried the mplayer from the Ubuntu Jaunty repository and the SVN version but behaviour is equally erratic in both.

Smplayer has some features I love that no other player has (mouse roll to FF/RW and automatic subtitle downloading for example) so I'm reluctant to switch to a more reliable player like xine or VLC if there's any chance of getting mplayer to run without crashing all the time.

Has anyone else similar problems or does anyone have a recommendation for a stable version?

Stuxnet

the dev gnome vlc is very reliable i find, never a problem

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome-media-player-development/development

worth a shot - karmic only afaik

pickarooney

I've no stability issues with VNC, it just doesn't have all the features I need. I might have to switch though - there seems to be a known bug with ASS support in (s)mplayer that's causign my grief and there are no apparent plans to fix it from what I gather.

Mathiasb

Jaunty? You seriously need to upgrade. mplayer has always worked for me. You could compile your own version if you want to, maybe that will solve the problem.

You should probably submit a bug report.

pickarooney

Mathiasb wrote: »

Jaunty?

Lord no! The three times I installed Karmic were utter disasters!

Mathiasb

pickarooney wrote: »

Lord no! The three times I installed Karmic were utter disasters!

Anything in particular? Bug reports are your saviour, my friend. Otherwise you'll probably see the same problem in the next release, and so on.

pickarooney

Sound kept disappearing,TV tuner was flat out not recognised, impossible to get a display with any version of nvidia drivers on the laptop and absolutely nothing new of use in the release. I know I shoukd contribute byug reporting but I wouldn't know where to start putting the blame and really don't have the time and need a working system.

Galen

Karmic is a pain, switch to Mint 8 "Helena"

pickarooney

I think I might switch to Mint, at least on the craptop, to see if it's any better

Mathiasb

pickarooney wrote: »

I think I might switch to Mint, at least on the craptop, to see if it's any better

I've heard good stuff about Mint, please share your Mind adventures

Mycroft H

Galen wrote: »

Karmic is a pain, switch to Mint 8 "Helena"

generally if the problem exsists in ubuntu karmic, it will probably still exsist in mint 8 as mint is based upon ubuntu.

Galen

ubiquity-dm tool crashes everytime I attempt to install karmic but Mint installs without a hitch.

pickarooney

Webcam, mplayer, video overlay... anything else I should test on Mint to see if it's worth switching to?
Does anyone know if I can share my /home directory between Mint and xubuntu installed on the same hard drive?

pickarooney

I picked up a version of mplayer in medibuntu and have gone 24 hours without a crash (not that I watched films for 24 hours...)

I tried the live CD of mint but it was equally **** at working my webcam.

Galen

I think ubuntu only supports a dozen or so webcams. Hardware support will always be a pain until hardware manufactuerers are willing to share detailed tech information with linux developers.

pickarooney

I got the webcam working on a part-time basis. It'll work for a couple of hours after I reboot and plug it in, then at some stage will just die. And skype will not transfer the image for some reason.