[i945gme] Computer freeze for 5mn while watching a video on VLC.

I seem to have the same problem or at least a very similar problem. I did not see this in Ubuntu 9.04. But after I upgrade to 10.04, I started to see it. Here is my symptom.

I use DVDAuthor to create DVD from video clips. When I play it on VLC, I noticed that between two video clips, VLC often freezes for a few seconds, but the progress bar continues to move. So when freeze is done, I have missed a small portion of the video. This freeze is very noticeable if I fast forward x8 speed (You may have to do this when playing DVD that has been copied to disk, x8 is too fast for a DVD disk).

Interesting thing is that this only happens if I play DVD by opening the DVD directory. If I open the individual VTS_01_x.VOB file from within the DVD directory, I do not see the freeze at all.

I have Dell Studio 15
10.04 x64, 4GB

I tested a little more and compared playing from a DVD directory with playing a VOB file from within the DVD directory. Playing the VOB files also has the freeze between the video clips, it is just not as obvious as playing DVD from the directory. It is as if VLC is playing, but when it gets close to the clip end, display does not update until next clip starts. It thus misses the end of the clip. Sometimes the freeze lasts a little longer so the beginning of the next clip is also missing.

I also want to point out that I group several clips together for a chapter. So the freeze happens at the border of each clip, not just between the chapters.

I did more digging on this one and have determined that the issue is with VLC itself. I installed VLC 1.1.4 on Windows and I see the same issue. But after I downgrade to VLC 0.9.9 (Which is equivalent to Ubuntu Jaunty's VLC version), I do not see the problem. I have opened a forum topic on VideoLAN to see if I can get help from experts over there.

Hi !

I'm still experiencing that issue with an Up to date Ubuntu system.
Got a very long freezer yesterdday, 10mn and the hard drive was still actively running and i just could do anything.

Any news about that problem ? Is it really reproduced by anybody else ?

Thanks.

This bug appears to involve a freeze of Xorg, probably due to a GPU
lockup in the kernel drm code, in a version of Ubuntu before
natty (or we couldn't determine the version from the report).

The X team has been investigating GPU lockups in Intel's video driver
during the natty development cycle. Many of these issues are now either
resolved or at least well understood. There are also better tools for
capturing and diagnosing these problems, but these tools are either
unavailable or incomplete in older versions of ubuntu, so debugging this
issue on pre-natty versions is unlikely to be productive. We're closing
out the bug report for this reason.

However, you may not yet be ready to upgrade to natty. It turned out
that a large number of these freezes were solved by updates to the
kernel. Thus, updating your kernel may be a workaround for you.
Updated kernel packages are available a variety of places, such as:

  http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

If you find a newer kernel fixes it, and think the fix should be
backported to earlier Ubuntu versions, please file a request against the
linux kernel in Ubuntu, indicating the broken and the fixed kernel
versions.

If it does not fix it, and you do not wish to upgrade to natty, please
follow up through technical support channels (e.g. http://askubuntu.com
is a good place for free support for older Ubuntu versions).

On the other hand, if you find after upgrading to natty and updating to
latest that you still experience GPU lockups, please reproduce the
problem, ssh into the frozen machine, and collect the file
/sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/i915_error_state and the output of 'dmesg >
dmesg.txt', and attach both to a new bug report.