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Media Players Eating Up All The RAM Upon Playing Video Files

id flag
user1558325

Everytime I tries to open a local video file (e.g. mp4 and mkv format) with VLC, SM Player, MVP Player, or any other video players, it uses up all the RAM which leads to computer crash. I thought this might be caused by the lack of decoders, so I installed the ubuntu-restricted-extras package from apt after doing some research. However, the situation was left unchanged after rebooting from the installation. What are some proper ways I can do to fix this?

Additional Information:

My laptop comes with dual graphics card (Intel and Nvidia). Since the Nvidia one is no longer functioning, I had Nouveau blacklisted with this method.

It only happens when playing though a local video player. Websites with videos such as YouTube works fine.

It couldn't be that the video file is corrupted, every single video I've tried leads to the same result.

Version Information:

I use Ubuntu Server 20.04

ffmpeg -version

ffmpeg version 4.2.4-1ubuntu0.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2020 the FFmpeg developers

cat /etc/os-release

NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="20.04.3 LTS (Focal Fossa)"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS"
VERSION_ID="20.04"
HOME_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-policy"VERSION_CODENAME=focalUBUNTU_CODENAME=focal

vlc --version

VLC media player 3.0.9.2 Vetinari (revision 3.0.9.2-0-gd4c1aefe4d)
VLC version 3.0.9.2 Vetinari (3.0.9.2-0-gd4c1aefe4d)

EDIT:

I installed XServer and i3-gaps WM for GUI Access. I have 4 GB of RAM, so it's definitely enough for video playback. My hardware capabilities should be enough, videos play fine when back then I was using Windows.

No error messages were shown from the media player. MPV Player says that it's using hardware encoding. I thought that could be a problem, so I tried disabling it in VLC Media Player, nothing has changed though.

Newer versions of Ubuntu have and use a swap file by default. This is the only task that seems to use up all my RAM from my experience, so it shouldn't be a problem of the RAM and swap itself.

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in flag
matigo
Ubuntu Server does not ship with a UI by default. Which one have you installed? Could you also share a bit more of your hardware specifications? How much RAM do you have installed? Is your processor relatively capable? Do you have a swap file to offload buffers when required? A bit more detail about the system itself may help someone offer a solution
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Tilman avatar
cn flag
Tilman
Also, please share how you came to the conclusion that the video player uses up all RAM. What exactly are the symptoms? Do you see any error messages?
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id flag
user1558325
@matigo As edited!
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id flag
user1558325
@Tilman As edited!
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Tilman avatar
cn flag
Tilman
I read your edited post but I still don't see why you think that your media player is "eating up all the RAM", especially if you say there were no error messages. Did you look at RAM usage on your system? Which tool did you use? What were the results?
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