Fix for VLC 3.X video freeze during movies

A few days ago I bough new monitor, a Philco 43" FHD. Since then, VLC started to freeze during playback on H264 MKV files.

I've been searching the web for the problem mentioned in title of this post. I have tried official solution which involves setting a higher value for file and video cache among other things. I have even upgraded it to the lastest version: 3.1.8.

But the problem persisted.

So I ended up doing the most basic thing to do when an specific software doesn't work: downgrading to a working version. Uninstalled version 3 and installed version 2.0.7 and I was able to play all H264 videos with no freeze.

Be warned thou, if you want to play H265 you will need either another player  or converting the files to H264. For converting the file, I made an script with generates an h264 dir in the current directory and then output the converted files there:

rudy@madcat3:~/bin$ cat convertir.h265.sh
#!/bin/bash
mkdir 264
for file in *.mkv
        do ffmpeg  -n -i "${file}" -map 0 -c:a aac -c:s copy -c:v libx264 264/"${file}"
done

script to kill a specific process by name

This one was made specifically for VLC since the stupid program sometimes hangs and there is no way to close it by normal means (Quit command, etc)

#!/bin/bash
$(echo -n kill -9 ; ps -A |grep vlc |grep -o "^ [0-9]*")

what it does is to create a command line on the fly by extracting vlc process id and then execute it.

ffmpeg conversion from h265 to h264

some strange reason, lastest version of VLC doesn't work very well under Slackware. I got sick tired of it and decided to go back to 2.0.7. But a problem arise when I want to watch a video encoded with h265. So I ended up converting them to h264 using a simple command line.

#!/bin/bash

for file in *.mkv
        do ffmpeg  -n -i "${file}" -map 0 -c:a aac -c:s copy -c:v libx264 264/"${file}"
done