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I have a low-end laptop (Lenovo Ideapad 100s). Sometimes, when I watch a recording of my university lectures, the whole system freezes. I can't move my mouse or use my keyboard. The freeze lasts 20 seconds or more until the system closes all programs itself and logs me out. The videos are approx. 90 minutes long and 300 MB in size. I have only one other program (gedit) open. Sometime I can watch two or three lectures without problems, but other days the laptop freezes more than every ten minutes. I use VLC media player, but the problem also happens with the default video player (Ubuntu 17.10). There's also an automatically generated log file named "core", which appeared in my user directory. It's >70 MB in size and I can't open it with gedit. I would upload it, but my upload speed is way too low (rural Germany).

Thanks for your help.

Rensing1
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  • What hardware are you using, especially the video card? – SurvivalMachine Dec 30 '17 at 13:11
  • I don't have a complete solution for your problem but I can suggest you to use mpv player. This is a amazing player and very light weight. To install mpv run this command without the quotes: "sudo apt install mpv". – Ryko Dec 30 '17 at 13:13
  • I have an Intel Celeron N3060 processor with integrated graphics. Playing videos works fine under Windows 10 (dual boot), even in 4k. Under Ubuntu, 720p Youtube videos lag. – Rensing1 Dec 30 '17 at 13:17
  • check when exactly this happens. if it happens when you scroll over the time slider then its a documented bug in vlc – Ankur S Dec 30 '17 at 13:24
  • Looks like it runs out of RAM. You need to investigate RAM usage, and also check the syslog: free -m and less /var/log/syslog. – mikewhatever Dec 30 '17 at 13:25
  • Could you please [edit] your question to include the output of the terminal command free -h and lspci -nnk | grep -A3 -Fe '[0300]'? /var/log/syslog may also hold useful information if you look for the entries that occurred just before the freeze. Thanks. – David Foerster Dec 30 '17 at 20:10

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The core file is an indicator that the player has been terminated due to some exception, e. g. a segfault or out of memory. Given the other symptoms you describe I would bet on an out of memory situation.

Personally I experienced VLC being a resource hog on older machines (probably on better equipped ones, too, but you won't notice), and switched to an mplayer based solution. So my suggestion is you try mpv (as already mentioned) or smplayer.

Murphy
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