Nick Rout wrote:
On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Nick Rout <[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Barry <[email protected]> wrote:
after many failed attempts to view movies I am at a complete loss on
where to search next for a cure to my problem.
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
Checked the output of 'ldd mplayer', & 'rpm -q -requires mplayer'. All
dependencies appear to be in place. Google produces many replies, none
work. Scrapped the original Xorg.conf, & allowed X to create a new one,
Then tried creating a new one with XFdrake. Have now removed as much as
possible of pulseaudio - still can not play movies.
The problem does not occur with an install of Mandriva one live for
2009.0 but this distro has other problems, and an upgrade to 2009.1
gives a messy system. The box is a Compac NX9040. The same distro runs
fine on my other box which is one I got from Craig / Avonside High, And
I think that install is an upgrade.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Barry
It is very hard to tell with so little information, and that is
probably because of the immediate crash which wipes out your debugging
info by crashing X and any xterm you are running from.
However IMHO it's likely to be a problem with the X driver. mplayer
and most other video players prefer to output via xv which enables
some direct interaction with hardware. It is a lot faster than using
x11, to the point where many movies will not play smoothly in x11.
However it is worth trying:
mplayer -vo x11 moviefile.avi
to see if it crashes, then the same using -vo xv to see if there is a
difference.
I see you are ion a notebook with presumably shared RAM between your
video system and your OS. Allocate as much ram as possible to video in
the bios.
By the way if you are having immediate crashes and cannot read the
mplayer output, try either starting mplayer from a console, where an X
crash won't affect you, or redirect mplayer's output to a file so it
survives the X crash. To start from a console, first of all in a
terminal within X run xhost + (this is a security risk but unless you
have intruders on your lan worry not)
then in a console run
export DISPLAY=:0
mplayer -vo xv moviefile.avi
the movie should play (or crash) in your X screen, but the console
will report back all the error messages.
The other obvious test is to run another distro from a livecd and see
if it will play a movie on your system. You'll probably need to pick a
live cd that has access to a good range of codecs (probably chris'
sabayon would work well, or pclinuxos perhaps), or pick a movie that
has open codecs.
I know a lot of first reactions were to put another version of linux
on your machine. A few simple tests should isolate the problem before
you do anything that radical.
I am in two minds about you switching distros. It can be a pain to
change and learn new tricks, but frankly I haven't seen much positive
about mandrivel in recent times.
Another thing to try is -vo null for mplayer, which will give no video
output, but if it still craashes then we are barking up the wrong tree
with the X11 stuff.
There is also our old friend strace to really look into what is making it crash!
There are no problems with video when running Mandriva 2009.0 either
live or installed
No I do not want to change distros, I want both boxes similar as possible.
ram in the lappie bios appears fixed at 32k part of 512k.
'mplayer -vo null file.avi' plays the sound track ok.
'mplayer -vo x11 file.avi' plays the sound and video ok.
'mplayer -vo xv file.avi' locks up keyboard, no mouse, mplayer screen
but no image. Had to restart X (from xterm login).
Chris talked me into trying Sabyon once upon a time, the splash screen
was yuk, and it installed every app known most of which I did not
want/need. He's still trying, good on you Chris.
rebooted with Mandriva 2009.0 running live, copied xorg.conf across to
hd, then restarted. Got the same results as before.
I also tried running a vid with mplayer by ssh from my other box
displaying on the laptop screen. Again it crashed.
My conclusion is that there is a fault in libxv1 which makes it
misbehave with the video card in the laptop. I have just also found on
the net that a very few others have had a similar problem with this
particular laptop model.
Have now put 'vo=x11' in my mplayer/config file but have yet to sort out vlc
