[Bug]: Frequent crashes when playing high-res videos

[rmader]

Describe the bug

I made a post with 4k@60fps test videos here: https://floss.social/@rmader/112320017496066938

Right now playing these does not work well. If it works it takes long to start - and in many cases it doesn't start at all or crashes for me. This seems to mainly have to do with the download process: once the videos where downloaded successfully, things seem to work reliably.

These are likely Gstreamer etc. issues, but I wanted to have a tracker bug here as well to refer to.

Steps To Reproduce

1. find and open the post at https://floss.social/@rmader/112320017496066938
2. try to play the videos

Logs and/or Screenshots

No response

Instance Backend

I'm not sure / Other

Operating System

Linux

Package

Flatpak

Troubleshooting information

Tested with Flatpak and manually compiled from main.

Additional Context

No response

[GeopJr]

I haven't looked into this yet but for completion:

• The download process is on https://github.com/GeopJr/Tuba/blob/main/src/Utils/Host.vala#L37-L71
• And the path gets set as the GtkVideo's filename

Ideally, I'd rather we streamed these rather than downloading them and then playing them but it's blocked by https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4062 which is blocked by https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer/-/issues/724

[rmader]

Ideally, I'd rather we streamed these rather than downloading them and then playing them but it's blocked by https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4062 which is blocked by https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer/-/issues/724

Ah, that's great to know, will put that on my list to look into.

[Rafostar]

Ideally, I'd rather we streamed these rather than downloading them

Hi, I dunno how Tuba would feel about using 3-rd party stuff, but it could technically use/integrate Clapper in its UI for playback, which:

a) Can actually stream video like this without the need to download (which seems inefficient for social media client - and video from this issue doesn't seem to crash caused by download since there is no download)
b) Can stream with working seeking Peertube videos (both HLS and MP4 - your issue #662) - you just have to replace https:// URI scheme with peertube:// to let it understand that this website hosts peertube
c) Has VALA bindings support (working example/test app here)
d) Has overall more features (more expanded APIs then GtkVideo which is very simple/minimalistic)
e) Lets you customize/build your own overlay playback controls panel with buttons/features that best suit your app if needed

Someone asked me to let you know about possibility. Please just ignore this comment if uninterested.

Cheers!

[rmader]

Hey, thanks for dropping this here. I didn't have a deep look at the Clapper lib yet, but I think it's worth thinking about. In order to make the tech stack not too complicated, I further wonder if parts of the clapper libs could be upstreamed to Gstreamer or GTK instead - or if existing components could be improved to take over the job.

[Rafostar]

upstreamed to Gstreamer or GTK instead

This issue is probably not gonna be best place to discuss this. I cannot find the link anymore, but I were told by one of GTK Devs (I think it was few years ago already) that GTK gives GtkVideo as something simple and more of a example then fully featured video player, and they are not interested to make and maintain something bigger then that as part of their Toolkit (comment which I fully understand and actually agree with).

GStreamer on the other hand already gives a playback API (GstPlay) which is more universal for other GUI toolkits and works differently (its a whole different API, without any sort of GTK integration/shared widget functionality - lots of stuff needs to be redone in app) then the one I did to optimize/target GTK specifically. They cannot be "merged" without breaking API/ABI compatibility and they won't want to maintain multiple APIs that do something similar but differently.

So yeah, I do not think this is gonna belong anywhere but inside its own repo, similarly like libadwaita. That is also why I am not gonna force anyone to use it 😄

Edit: Also, isn't this too early to even start a discussion on this topic? 🙃

[GeopJr]

From Tuba's side, I'm very interested in using clapper, especially if it solves issues with streaming and #749 (@rmader that might interest you too, I can't reproduce it on qemu or desktop 🤷)

[rmader]

Turns out that https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer/-/issues/724 has long been fixed (in Gst 1.22.1, i.e. old stable), so maybe we can already enable it with just a few lines changed.

[rmader]

Hm, just opened #925 which (IIUC) enables streaming - and seems to solve the issue here 🤷

Unfortunately we're loosing the cache then, I wonder if we can improve on that.

[GeopJr]

Probably fixed by: #1308