On Fri 23 Apr 2010 17:08:33 NZST +1200, Barry wrote: > Every time I try to view any movie X crashes requiring a restart and > sometimes locks the kbd. This happens with mplayer and vlc. It follows a > clean install of Mandriva2009.1 The only msg I have is 'Unsupported > pixel format' but can not find anything in the logs after restarting
As others have pointed out, the root cause of your problem is one of two: 1) Your distro ships broken X drivers or a broken xorg. No application should cause your xorg to crash no matter what pile of dirt data it shoves at it. This is not a recommendation for your xorg version or the xorg driver version for your video hardware. File a bug report with your distro. An X crash is a serious bug, what you've been running is irrelevant except for debugging. It is possible the xorg bug is only triggered by using certain features of it, and it may be that only some (specifically video playing) applications use these broken features. This is assuming our xorg actually crashes - use ps after a crash to check. If only mplayer&Co crash, your xorg still runs but may become unusable (which I count as an xorg or general Linux bug too). 2) Your hardware is broken, but the problem mainly only shows when using some xorg features but not others. Perhaps it's even bad RAM, and the bad area is only used when you play videos. Many possibilities exist. It can be rather difficult to distinguish between 1) and 2). Saying the same distro works on another PC doesn't tell you that your xorg has no problems if the PC has different graphics hardware. Nick gave you some good advice for capturing the crash output. Start the program from a text console instead, and/or redirect its output to file. Use strace and ltrace. If your X app causes your xorg to crash, you need to trace xorg. Either way, I expect you're either going to be fixing your hardware or be waiting for your distro vendor to supply fixed software. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
