VLC fix or alternative
 

VLC does what I want, however, it often freezes up my system so that it's difficult to even kill itself. I have to do a hard reset because while playing something it gets stuck. If there's something I can do to stop that, what is it?

If not, is there a more stable but equally capable alternative? I don't want to hunt for codecs.

VLC is one of the best that I have used and have not seen any posts about that. Maybe others have.

Might be other issues. Try memtest maybe for a few days.
I'd look at hardware. Might check bios settings and set to default or failsafe. Check that you have best quality cables going to the hard drives and cd drives.

It depends on the format of the video .
If a store bought dvd i use VLC

If a everyday mp4 or wmv or avi i use SMplayer.A qt based front end to Mplayer with the 2011 ALL codec pack .
With libdvdcss and libdvdread installed mplayer can mostly play most "VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_01_2.VOB,..."

OP, tell us more about your hardware. CPU, RAMs, Video card, stuff like that.

I extracted seemingly useful sections. If you can indicate specific info, I can provide it. Or you can look it up, since it's prebuilt.
Regarding the player, it's important that it has good playlist formatting capabilities - displaying tags, album, etc. I'm talking about music because I want to clarify that VLC freezes even when playing audio only, not necessarily video. I'm thinking about running winamp over wine since it's good in that respect. Would it work well?

So the problem occurs only when playing audio? This is truly strange.

What kind of sound card (I'm not a hardware guru, but if one checks out this thread, he or she will want to know that)?

I don't care about playlists. I pick something, play it, and then pick something else--guess I'm still stuck in the album frame of mind--but I have heard very good things about Banshee.

Have you tested with another media player, such as Totem (I think it shows on the menu as "Movie Player")? I think it would be useful to determine whether it's simply a Rhythm Box problem or potentionally larger.

I've never tested Winamp with Wine, but the Wine website gives reason for optimism.

vlc is one of the best media players present today....i've never faced any problem with that and also never seen anyone.
I think it is a hardware issue...using another media player most likely won't solve the issue,i think !
Have you been using VLC always or what you used before VLC ?

I haven't used anything before in the current setup. I've used vlc on windows in this pc and it was fine. ubuntu is overall often slow whenever something is going on, like updates. But xp is fine.

you are scaring me now...:D
I've never seen anyone say like that...there is definitely something with your installation/configuration !

what is the hardware specs??
something like 512 meg ram on a old xp computer from 2001

--- a few posts above , missed it ---------
product: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz

ok an old p4 ( i have one from 2001 that is 1.99 to 2.01 GHz )
1 gig ram
and a [GeForce4 MX 440]

sounds a LOT like my old box a 10 year old DELL
i have a gforce2 mx 400


you DO know you can not use the 270 nvidia.run
you need the legacy 96.43.19
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-d...19-driver.html

that box WILL be slow turn off every NOT NEEDED service that starts up on boot
have 2 to 4 gig swap and make sure that there is a lot of space on the partition that has /tmp

and think about using Arch or scientificlinux 6 ( i have that on the 10 year old computer right now -- was Arch )
be WARNED though that GeForce4 MX 440 card will cause problems .Nvidia was going to drop support for gforce 5 and older 3 years ago - they did not yet . but any time they will the gf4 is about 10 years old

I'll take a look at it.

I tried other players, I think they were fine but they all suffered in terms of playlist capabilities. Some music has essential info stored in tags, and without it being displayed I couldn't tell songs apart. But I don't think any of them froze.

I tried winamp over wine, and it didn't work well. It would start playing the song and then just pause, and clicking play wouldn't do anything. It didn't produce sound at any point.

I didn't know that. How was I supposed to find that out?

What kind of problems?

for nvidia most distros are using the open Nouveau driver
and legacy cards may or may not work well with it

but to the question " How was I supposed to find that out"
the exact same way you did on windows
going to the nvidia web site and looking for the driver

you type in the card and it shows you the driver for that card

mainly with newer versions of Xorg ( X11) the 96 driver was last rebuilt for the 1.9 xrog and the 1.8 before and the 1.7 ....

for the nvidia gforce 2 , 4 , and 5 cards they are LEGACY support

this happened to me LEFT and RIGHT on fedora
i would get a kernel and x11 update and it would kill the nvidia driver
Then i would wait for 2 weeks , 3 weeks, 2 MONTHS for the old driver to be rebuilt for the NEW x11
so NO 3D for 14 days to 60 days
and only 800x600 screen res using the NOW DEAD nv 2d only driver ( replaced by the Nouveau driver)

right now the 96 driver ONLY goes up to "X11R7.6 -- X Server 1.9 "

The joys of legacy hardware .
right now i have ScientificLinux6 .1 running on my old box
rhel/cent/sl will work on it for a few years yet
fedora 15,16,17,... ? no
ubuntu11.10 not for long

I tried multiple other players, and none of them freeze. They each have different strengths. I installed all codecs so that's not a point of comparison. Banshee displays the required info in playlist, however it has somewhat broken manual sorting - e.g., I try to move files to this line, they don't move at all. They move only to particular lines.

VLC, of course, allows only to insert to the end of the playlist, but aside from freezing it still seems to have the best interface on linux for music.