I'm using a raspberry pi as a NAS, serving video over SMB (sshfs made it skip too much, NFS I never got working). I prefer to watch movies with smplayer, from my Xubuntu laptop (opening the smb share in Thunar).
It works fine most of the time, but once in a while (not sure what causes it), smplayer will hang. I can quit the window, but the two smplayer processes still exist (one of them ), it won't start a new window, and kill (even kill -9) doesn't remove the processes. I can play the file with Parole, but the only way I can get smplayer to play it again is to reboot.
I'm guessing this means (s)mplayer is in 'uninterruptible sleep' due to some hickup with serving the file over the network, but how do I work around this? All networks have hickups some times, is there really a situation in Linux where the only solution is a reboot? EDIT: Seems like yes, if the parent process is 1, the only safe method is a reboot. But is there a way to stop it from going defunct in the first place?
In this particular instance,
ps -ef|grep mplayershows something likeand the two cannot be killed, however, by killing gvfsd, the mplayer process seemed to return from its uninterruptible sleep, and I could play movies again.