Linux Mint Forums

I update to Upgrade Pack 3 when it came out a few days ago. (I had recently install LMDE with Upgrade Pack 2 after moving from Julia.) Julia and LMDE / UP2 ran just fine and has since Julia came out. Almost everything in UP3 works fine too and I had no issues during the upgrade install. However...

Music and video playback has a long pause of about a minute before anything will start playing. Banshee is my normal music player. When I select a song to play, it does nothing for a minute before starting to play. Once it plays, it plays just fine. It will also go to the next song without any delay. That is true no matter if the song is just the next in the list or if shuffle is on. It only does the delay when I manually select another song.

The same thing happens when I play any video stored locally or inside the standard Chromium that same with UP3. In fact, I get this delay of a minute with any video or audio played with any tool/software. All other players that I have tried give me the same minute delay before starting.

I did see the message about errors with gstreamer, but I didn't get that or any error message during the install or during any playback. BTW, System Monitor is not showing any additional activity during that minute of time. i.e. I don't see any process that is running that might be the cause.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Clyde

In trying to figure this out, I've noticed a couple of other things. One is that Banshee will occasionally crashes right after playing a song. It's not very often, but it does.

I also tried to play some videos online. I can't get Chromium, FireFox, or Opera to play any online videos. They will take the same minute delay to startup, but when they startup it's about 1 frame per minute. I downloaded some videos and played some videos I've had for years on my computer. They all take the minute to start, but played the video just fine. Well, they played the video, but not a single one played any audio. This was with all video file formats.

An odd twist was that a few videos I tried to play online with FireFox and Opera gave me an error that the script was causing Adobe Flash Player to run really slowly. That makes me wonder about Flash. Since a lot of this doesn't use Flash, I'm wondering what background or system level media part of Linux they all use that might be causing the problem. Alas, I'm not good enough to know that or even know where to look.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Clyde

I finally figured it out...

Something about my Logitech E3500 webcam was causing the problem. It wasn't working right, but I didn't think it was the cause. Lying in bed waking up, it hit me that I should try to unplug it. Everything has been working just fine since then. All videos, local or Web, play just fine. Banshee plays all music just fine, without delay. It doesn't crash any more either.

This webcam worked just fine under Upgrade Pack 2. Something in Upgrade Pack 3 broke the driver or something related to this webcam. Now I have to find a webcam that will work.

Clyde