GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 133825
[nautilus-media] gst-thumbnail occasionally goes nuts, consumes all available memory
Last modified: 2006-04-01 10:31:40 UTC
Occaisionally gst-thumbnail will start up and proceed to consume all availible memory (using gnome-system monitor it shows as using 800+MB of RAM on a system with only 512MB of real RAM) and it simply does not stop, even when left unattended for several hours. CTRL-ALT-DEL/CTRL-ALT-BKSP/switching to another virtual terminal become totally useless, and the only option is to reboot. Unfortunately I can't reproduce this bug, I don't know exactly what causes it, all I know is that it seems to happen most when I have several open applications.
I have been able to reproduce this bug with the attached file. The problem shows up during Firefox downloads, when only the file is being written to disk (with the ".part" extension). Also, the WMV codec isn't supported by gstreamer, which probably doesn't help the situation. Regardless, I'm bumping the severity to critical, since this bug consumes 100% of CPU resources, and effectively trashes Joe-I-don't-know-how-to-kill-an-application's session.
Created attachment 31696 [details] Partially downloaded WMV from Firefox
WMV files are in fact ASF files WMV1 and WMV2 are supported by gstreamer (as well as WMA1 and WMA2 for audio) only WMV3 and WMA3 aren't supported (mplayer uses windows dll files to play them) ---- got sound working with totem got no video because it is WMV3 i use gstreamer CVS and totem CVS so, it's probably a problem is gst-thumbnail itself
as nautilus-media (which provides gst-thumbnail) would certainly not be maintained anymore (replaced by other similar/better code from totem), i doubt it would be fixed one day
Since it's a nautilus-media bug, I'm reassigning it to them.
Additional: I have noticed that while Azureus is downloading a video, the thumbnailer makes a thumbnail for every hash of that file (which changes as it is downloaded). This has filled up my .thumbnails dir with 30,000 thumbnails! (almost a GB of them) This is on Gnome 2.8.3 from Debian unstable.
I have been bitten by this occasionally. I mostly just turn gnome-video-thumbnailer off. It also happens sometimes with media files on cdrom or DVD.
nautilus-media is discontinued.