Core dumps when viewing video (gentoo)

[Thornhill]

I know compiling from source isn't supported, but I figured I'd give it a shot in case anybody had seen this.

I'm attempting to run boxee build 4826 (built from source) on my 32-bit gentoo box. Once I tracked down all the dependencies, it built just fine, and it even seemed to largely work.

Unfortunately, whenever I try to access a web video, one of two things happen:

1) The progress wheel just spins eternally, never completing. All I can do is cancel out (it seems some people have this with the binary build on Ubuntu, too)

or, worse:

2) Boxee shows a progress bar, that fills to completion, only to core dump with a floating point exception as soon as I would expect the video playback to start

I enabled debug output logging as mentioned elsewhere in the forum, but I reviewed the logs and they don't indicate that anything seems abnormal prior to the crash.

I also performed an strace which yielded nothing of apparent value.

The one clue I do have is from the core dump, which ends thusly:

Program terminated with signal 8, Arithmetic exception.
#0 0xb7d26030 in snd_pcm_bytes_to_frames () from /usr/lib/libasound.so.2

I tried poking around in the source, but I only have minimal experience with C++ and it wasn't really clear to me what was causing this to happen. snd_pcm_bytes_to_frames (which is provided by that ALSA library) expects 2 arguments (a PCM handle and a number of bytes) and is supposed to return the number of frames contained within them.

I'm guessing that the arithmetic exception is likely a divide by 0, but before I start futilely trying to figure out what's happening on my own I figured I'd check in here first.

FWIW, my alsa-lib ebuild is version 1.0.17a.

[protcron]

1) The progress wheel just spins eternally, never completing. All I can do is cancel out (it seems some people have this with the binary build on Ubuntu, too)

I can only comment on the above, but this sounds like a dependency issue. I know about as much about Gentoo as I know about proctology, which isn't much.
That said, I have seen this with dependency problems in custom Ubuntu builds. You should try to nail down the behavior to what application is being used. From my research, Boxee uses two different apps. bxflplayer is one, and that seems to be to play WB, Hulu, CBS and a few others. But the other player seems to play CNN, Apple Trailers, and You Tube. (I think I'm right here, please correct me if I am wrong.)
If the behavior is similiar, the spinning will happen on WB, Hulu and CBS. In that case add the Gentoo equivalent of libnss3-1d libnss3-0d libnspr4-0d (from Ubuntu's repositories.)

Also, take a look at this thread: http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=4723

I have the same problems.

[Thornhill]

I can only comment on the above, but this sounds like a dependency issue. I know about as much about Gentoo as I know about proctology, which isn't much.
That said, I have seen this with dependency problems in custom Ubuntu builds. You should try to nail down the behavior to what application is being used. From my research, Boxee uses two different apps. bxflplayer is one, and that seems to be to play WB, Hulu, CBS and a few others. But the other player seems to play CNN, Apple Trailers, and You Tube. (I think I'm right here, please correct me if I am wrong.)
If the behavior is similiar, the spinning will happen on WB, Hulu and CBS. In that case add the Gentoo equivalent of libnss3-1d libnss3-0d libnspr4-0d (from Ubuntu's repositories.)

Also, take a look at this thread: http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=4723

I have the same problems.

Great, thanks for the advice. This got me part of the way there - I did have nspr installed, but the version I have does not provide the libnspr4.so.0d symlink that bxflplayer-linux required. I created that symlink (I know that's not the right way to do this, but I don't think gentoo has an ebuild that provides this) and now I'm at least able to view hulu and some other providers.

I'm still getting the core dumps when viewing several sources, such as youtube. I'll keep at it.

[bizthepirate]

You said that Youtube would bring about that error? Does CNN as well, and if so, which others do? I know that Youtube actually uses the Python inteface, and not the flash based one that hulu and others use. So, perhaps you have a problem there?

[chasep2001]

Dont know if you are still having this issue or not, but from this thread:
http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=2309

I found that I needed to emerge alsa-lib with the debug use flag.

After I did that, things worked great.