System crash whenever I play any video with any player in Ubuntu Mate 18.04.3 after update

Hello
After I performed an update with software updater, videos no longer play on my laptop. Whenever I open one, the system crashes and becomes unresponsive.
I don't know what logs to provide to help diagnose the problem. Any help is appreciated.
Thanks.

Welcome. Sorry you have had issues.

We will need some information about your system so folks will be able to assist.

Can you go to the MATE System Monitor and click on the System tab and take a screen shot with an Alt-PrintScn and post that here please.

Thanks for your reply. Here's the screenshot

Thanks. A few questions:

  • What application(s) are you using to open videos?
  • What is the file type of these videos?
  • I've tried MPV, VLC, and SMPlayer and they all cause the same problem. Also opening MPV even without a video at all causes the system to hang as well. I can still open VLC, but without loading a video.

  • All the videos I've tried until now are h264 videos in MKV containers.

Can you boot into an older kernel in Grub [Press SHIFT while booting to access]?

And let us know if that works. If it does, can you let us know which kernel you were booted into.? You can do this by opening a terminal and typing uname -a

I booted into kernel 5.0.0-37 and unfortunately I still have the problem

Thanks for trying that.

Please run the Software Updater and see if there are any updates.

As for log files. You can open the Log File Viewer and see if you can spot anything out of the ordinary. I'd look at Xorg, syslog, dmesg, and apport first and see if anything is showing crashes or errors.

It may make sense to run htop in a separate Window while you try to play any video and see if you can stop a process that is doing something unusual.

I've figured it out.

It turned out I was using updated open graphics drivers. These are built daily. Today's update is probably broken which is why I was having this problem with it. I've reverted to Ubuntu's original drivers and now everything is working fine.

I probably should've said from the start that I wasn't using the original drivers, but I've been using the updated ones for quite some time now with no problems so I totally forgot about them. Sorry.

Glad you got it sorted out.