Bug#575089: gnash: Crippling memory leak

[Gabriele Giacone]

On Sun, Sep 08, 2013 at 07:29:49PM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote:
> Not sure if it's the same problem the bug reporter has (the bug is
> already rather old, after all), but recently I noticed excessive memory
> by gtk-gnash when playing videos on YouTube.  For instance, after
> playing the (less than 3 minutes long) clip at
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl89g2SwMh4 gtk-gnash's resident memory
> size is over 800 Megabytes.
> 
> This is with 0.8.11~git20130903-2 from unstable.

Issue is reproducible and doesn't depend on movie in question. Also got a crash
by playing a longer movie after ~5 mins.

gnash builds both ffmpeg and gstreamer media handlers and defaults to ffmpeg.
I'd suggest to switch to gstreamer which doesn't behave that way:

$ echo "set MediaHandler gst" >~/.gnashrc

We could make gst default.