Problems with vlc 0.2.80

[Michael Flohr]

Finally, I got the release 0.2.80 of vlc running.
When it runs, it is fantastic, but unfortunately it
crashes in about 70% of cases right at the start.

My system:
SuSE Linux 7.0,
kernel 2.2.16
(so I always use "vlc ... --imdct imdct --downmix downmix")
XFree 4.0.1
SDL 1.2
KDE 2.1.2
Crystal sound fusion cs416x with alsa 0.5x
ATI rage 128 mobility LF AGP 2 with 16 MB
  at 1400x1050 and 24bpp
P III 750 MHz with 256 MB ram

Here a small list of the problems I encounter,
does nayone has some hints for me?

1.) Using with KDE 2.1.2:
    Up to release 0.2.73 vlc started up immediately
    grabbing the sound device. So it was very easy to
    simply type "artsshell suspend ; vlc ..." to
    get sound working. This does not work anymore.
    Is there any workaround other than
    "artsshell terminate", i.e. other than killing
    the artsd demon? Using "artsdp vlc ..." is not
    a good option since this leads to sound not in
    sync with the picture (and higher CPU usage).
    How get other KDE users sound working?

2.) Sound:
    For reasons beyond my understanding,
    vlc seems to have its own will: I usually
    start it as "vlc -A dsp ... -vvvv", but in half of
    the cases it still insists on using the esd sound
    plugin. Why? Also, it then always complains that
    I am using the esd sound plugin and ... such that
    I should expect a 1 second delay ... and that I
    should use "esdctl off". Checking the processes
    on my system I cannot find anything running related
    to esd. However, esdctl reports that the server is
    running. Question: Is it possible that vlc, when it
    crashes, leaves certain things untidy such that
    starting it again might run into more problems?
    Sometimes, I don't get any sound at all, but only
    hundreds of messages that /dev/dsp is occupied.
    Another strange thing I don't understand is, why
    vlc seems to search for certain sound kernel modules,
    since the console log of system messages reports that
    sound-card-X and sound-X could not be found, where
    X=1,2,3. Of course, I only have one sound device,
    and sound-card-0 and sound-0 are loaded (I hope I got
    the names right). This behaviour did not occur with
    0.2.73.

3.) Xvideo:
    vlc runs quite ok with the sdl video plugin, but
    preformance is much much better with the xvideo
    plugin. However, the probability of crash increases
    dramatically using xvideo plugin. Starting a dvd
    lets vlc open an audio and a video output. As soon
    as the xvideo window pops up, vlc crashes in about
    70% of the cases with various messages.
    Most often, it says
    "Gdk-ERROR **: BadShmSeg (invalid shared segment parameter)
      serial 39 error_code 178 request_code 146 minor_code 2"
    But giving it another try or two, it usually works then.
    Next often is the error
    "PES trashed - decoder fifo full !",
    and the third often error I get are segfaults.
    Very rarely, when switching around different
    chapters or titles on the dvd, vlc simply freezes
    and I get an error from Xlib sysing that there was
    an unexpected async event followed by some (varying)
    hex number code.
    I was not able to find any pattern under which
    circumstances which of the above errors/crashes occurs.
    However, NONE of this happens with vlc 0.2.73,
    and playing mpegs seems to be much less problematic.
    There, only the BadShmSeg error sometimes occurs.

4.) Parameters:
    The 'manual page' under doc/vlc.1 says that vlc
    accepts lots of parameters. However, when giving
    one of them on the command line (as the manual page
    suggests) does not have any effect except an error
    message refering to this command line argument.
    So, how do I pass parameters to vlc?

5.) Options:
    Giving options such as "-t num" does not seem to
    have any effect. The dvd doess not automatically
    start playing, and when opening the "Play Disk"
    menu, the chapter and title number are back to
    their default value 1.

Don't get me wrong - vlc is a great piece of work,
and as I said, it works fantastically when it works.
With xvideo plugin, the performance is simply great,
very smooth video, perfect fullscreen, and all this
with typically around 30% CPU usage only! With SDL,
performance is not that good (around 50%) and the
video is a little bit jerky. Also, the pciture quality
is less, the edges are more raggy. Also, resizeing
under SDL freezes vlc.

Michael