25 August 2006

VLC misbehaved!

VLC is a swiss knife when it comes to playing or streaming audio/video files. I have been all praise for it till now, but I had to pluck one feather off its cap due to unruly behaviour today.

I wanted to test a video created using imagemagick and ffmpeg on my Macbook Pro(MBP). I started up VLC and tried to play the file in it. As I had expected (due to possible unavailability of codecs) it showed me an error that the file is not supported. So I just closed the window thinking I will get back to using a different codec and test later. I leave the laptop with around 87% battery life remaining and went to make a sandwich. After around 15minutes, I was surprised to see the screen still showing the desktop instead of the MBP going to sleep in 5minutes. The battery life remaining showed only 47% remaining!

Started up the good old terminal and checked what the problem was using top. It showed me that a certain process VLC was using up 99.9% of the CPU! KILL, KILL, Terminate was my reaction using another terminal which lead to normal functioning of the MBP. Need to do some bug searching to see if this has been reported.

Moral: Do not leave your MBP/MB around with VLC running. Quit VLC after you end using it.

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