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KDE Plasma 6 reboots on video playback

Since about Plasma 6 onward I've been getting system restarts when attempting to play back video files and/or seek through them.

The system will crash and reboot when:

  • Attempting to play any video with an mp4 container (mpv and vlc tested)
  • Attempting to seek with the mouse while playing most videos (mp4 and matroska)
  • Scrolling too fast in a file manager
  • Clicking and dragging to resize various windows (terminal, browsers, etc)

The system performs fine when:

  • Playing videos in a webm container
  • Playing videos in software like avidemux, kdenlive, gwenview, etc.
  • Streaming video in a web browser

The issue has persisted through these toubleshooting measures:

  • Update to latest BIOS firmware
  • Switching between Wayland and X11
  • Substitution of the PSU to a brand new unit

My assumption so far is that it's not hardware related. Currently I suspect it's Plasma. Below is the journal output of records around one such crash time of 5.19-5.20pm:

Suggestions for next steps would be welcome. Is it worth considering a rollback to the previous/older Plasma versions? Assuming Plasma doesn't like my DAC or keyboard or whatever, is it worth substituting or removing USB devices?

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6 comments
  • So get this: I tested a live USB, and initially any video playback caused the crash, then 4k video in VLC played fine, including manual seek, but 1080p material first killed screen output then triggered the reboot. Fucking nuts. Too much window resizing also triggered it. But it gets weirder. After half a dozen restarts and auto-checkdisks, I currently haven't encountered the bug at all on my main partition.

6 comments