banshee unable to stream audio for more than a few minutes

Bug #677555 reported by Roger Binns
38
This bug affects 8 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
banshee (Ubuntu)
Incomplete
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: banshee

I like to listen to various one hour long music podcasts from dance tunes radio. From their RSS feed I get the URL to a podcast and then in banshee Open Location and paste it in. Banshee will start playing the podcast but after anywhere from one to twenty minutes will suddenly stop. The screen will show it buffering and stuck, for example right now at 9%. The play pause button also changes to the green play icon. If I use wget against the podcast then it downloads just fine. An example feed is http://blog.dance-tunes.com/sensation/Sensation_Podcast.xml

(No I don't want to do RSS feed subscription within banshee - I just want it to play URLs reliably.)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: banshee 1.8.0-2ubuntu1~maverick1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.35-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Nov 19 09:36:32 2010
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: banshee

Revision history for this message
Roger Binns (ubuntu-rogerbinns) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Victor Vargas (kamus) wrote :

Please can you try to reproduce this issue using latest release of banshee from the daily ppa repository (there is currently 1.9.2 version for Ubuntu Maverick)? Thanks!

Changed in banshee (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Victor Vargas (kamus) wrote :

Roger, any news about this issue?

Revision history for this message
Roger Binns (ubuntu-rogerbinns) wrote :

I work around the problem by manually downloading the podcasts to local files and then they play just fine in any player.

Revision history for this message
Victor Vargas (kamus) wrote :

Roger, could be possible to reproduce it with a newer release of banshee (1.9.2/1.9.3) for check if this issue is still affecting you?

Revision history for this message
Roger Binns (ubuntu-rogerbinns) wrote :

Why would I bother? The "does it still happen" response seems standard for Ubuntu tickets.

I gave enough information to reproduce the issue. There is no indication that anything was done to fix it or that if it still exists then anyone would make the effort to fix it.

Revision history for this message
Victor Vargas (kamus) wrote :

Roger, I have suscribed that playlist in my banshee release from daily ppa(1.9.3 with Ubuntu Maverick) and I downloaded three session without any problems. Sorry but we need to check which version are you using to figure out what is going on. Please, could you run in a terminal "banshee --debug" in a terminal and attach all the output information in a separate file into your report we really appreciated (while you are trying to reproduce this issue). Thanks.

Revision history for this message
Roger Binns (ubuntu-rogerbinns) wrote :

The version information is right in the original description as ubuntu-bug records. See the line:

Package: banshee 1.8.0-2ubuntu1~maverick1

Note the problem is *not* subscribing to RSS feeds or letting banshee download the contents, neither of which I do. The problem is in playing a URL directly. For example in the feed the first item points to http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/blog.dance-tunes.com/sensation/2010/de/WK52_SENSATION_DE-FEDDE_LE_GRAND.mp3 so enter that as the URL in Open Location.

The bug is most likely in the buffering such as buffer underflows which means that other factors such as how busy my link is and the provider's link become. There is no preference for controlling buffer size in Banshee.

Revision history for this message
Gary Timuss (gary-timuss) wrote :

I experience the same problem and have monitored output with --debug

There may well be two issues here.

In my environment, I have highly variable bandwidth.

When bandwidth drops below that needed to maintain the stream rate, once the buffer has been exhausted, the player pauses the stream and tries to refill the buffer.

Sometimes the buffer gets up to 99.0% and then just stays there, eventually the stream drops out. That behaviour may well be a bug, as my network doesn't stop altogether, but what comes through to banshee does stop.

The problem could be substantially mitigated if the buffer size were configurable.

Revision history for this message
Victor Vargas (kamus) wrote :

Roger, maybe this could be connected to bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=571027

Revision history for this message
Alex Popovskiy (alex-popovskiy) wrote :

This bug is still there in recent banshee ( 2.1.0-1ubuntu5) from Oneiric daily image, I'm trying to listen online radio (http://music.myradio.com.ua:8000/pophit128.ogg) and it plays ok for few minutes and then just stops playing the stream. Sometimes toggling stop/play helps, sometimes banshee just freezes.

Revision history for this message
Mark Thornton (mthornton-2) wrote :

Still present in Banshee 2.2.1 running ubuntu 11.10. At home BBC Radio 2 will play for up to an hour or so before stopping with buffering stuck. At my office it will stop within 15 minutes. Usually play can be restarted by simply double clicking on the station or using the start/stop buttons. Same behaviour with BBC Radio 3 except play time is less (higher bit rate and thus more susceptible to network quality).

Revision history for this message
Roger Binns (ubuntu-rogerbinns) wrote :

I gave up on streaming completely and download everything locally first. Even when the file is on disk I encounter banshee getting confused. The UI will show that it is playing, but it isn't. Pressing play/pause has no effect. Only double clicking on the file and moving the slider to the right position gets it going again. If it can't be reliable for a local file, it will hardly manage with a remote one.

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