Re: serious X problem

2010-04-26 Thread Nick Rout
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Jim Cheetham  wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:57 PM, Barry  wrote:
>> '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).
>
> So, Mandriva One 2009.0 works fine in all three cases, but 2009.1
> fails with xv? What about 2010.0?
>
> 
> Instead of changing the whole system, you might consider getting the
> source for the libxv1 from 2009.0 (or 2010.0) and compiling it up,
> then manually installing it on the 2009.1 system ...
> 
>
> This may screw something else up, of course ... but it might be a
> good-enough bandaid. Bonus points if you can actually identify the
> differences between working/non-working, and for actually packaging
> the manual build into an RPM so you can remove it easily.

There are some good howtos about for building rpm's from source.

However of course it could also be an interaction between libxv and
something else that is at fault. There seem to be indications on the
mandriva forums that the i810 drivers are a bit borked, which could be
the problem.

What's more 
http://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxv1&submit=Search+...

suggests that libxv is the same version in 2009.0 as 2009.1, and
what's more that the changelog hasn't changed since 2008.

There is a change to 2010.0 though:

* Thu Sep 03 2009 Christophe Fergeau  1.0.4-3mdv2010.0
  + Revision: 425949
  - rebuild

http://fr2.rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/mandriva/2010.0/i586/media/main/release/libxv1-1.0.4-3mdv2010.0.i586.html


Re: serious X problem

2010-04-26 Thread Jim Cheetham
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:57 PM, Barry  wrote:
> '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).

So, Mandriva One 2009.0 works fine in all three cases, but 2009.1
fails with xv? What about 2010.0?


Instead of changing the whole system, you might consider getting the
source for the libxv1 from 2009.0 (or 2010.0) and compiling it up,
then manually installing it on the 2009.1 system ...


This may screw something else up, of course ... but it might be a
good-enough bandaid. Bonus points if you can actually identify the
differences between working/non-working, and for actually packaging
the manual build into an RPM so you can remove it easily.

-jim


Re: serious X problem

2010-04-26 Thread chris
On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 14:54 +1200, yuri wrote:
> Currently downloading PClinuxOS 2010.
> The best Mandrivative around.
> 
> Barry, would you like to try it? It has all the Mandriva goodness and
> none of the toxins :-)
> 
> Yuri
Is that the version that has all the codecs include from the start?
regards Chris T



Re: serious X problem

2010-04-26 Thread yuri
Currently downloading PClinuxOS 2010.
The best Mandrivative around.

Barry, would you like to try it? It has all the Mandriva goodness and
none of the toxins :-)

Yuri


Re: serious X problem

2010-04-26 Thread Nick Rout
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 2:15 PM, Steve Holdoway  wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 14:07 +1200, Nick Rout wrote:
>
>> The other thing to try is xvinfo and see what it says.
>
> I'm sure there's a mandriva 2010.0 available. That'd be my startng
> point...
>
> Steve

Yes I see that too.

Frankly any distro that has links to "download" or "buy" is suspicious
IMHO. Trawling around their forums for a few minutes trying to find
help for Barry, there doesn't seem to be a lot of developer input, it
is very much the blind leading the blind. I suspect to get developer
help you need to pay :)


Re: serious X problem

2010-04-26 Thread Steve Holdoway
On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 14:07 +1200, Nick Rout wrote:

> The other thing to try is xvinfo and see what it says.

I'm sure there's a mandriva 2010.0 available. That'd be my startng
point...

Steve


-- 
Steve Holdoway 
http://www.greengecko.co.nz
MSN: st...@greengecko.co.nz
Skype: sholdowa


smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature


Re: serious X problem

2010-04-26 Thread Nick Rout
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:57 PM, Nick Rout  wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:57 PM, Barry  wrote:
>> Nick Rout wrote:
>>>
>>>
>> 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.
>
>
> I assume you mean M not k?
>
>
>>
>> '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,
>
> for heavens sake who looks at the splash screen for more than a few seconds?
>
>>and it installed every app known most of which I did not want/need.
>> He's still trying, good on you Chris.
>
> The fact is that your distro is broken, and that's why the change is 
> suggested.
>
> You might like to try pclinuxOS which is based on mandrivel, so should
> be familiar to you.
>
> http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-pclinuxos-2010-kde
>
>>
>> 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.
>
> The point of doing it that way was to get the output and post it back
> here (or google on the error) to see what is going wrong. Try posting
> the results back.
>
>>
>> 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
>
> x11 will be very slow in comparison to xv. I suggest an strace run to
> confirm the problem. Then contact mandrivel through their support
> channels (I assume they support their users, but last time I looked,
> admittedly a long time ago, they were very unfriendly.)
>
> Along these lines, have you updated since installation?
>
> vlc will also allow you to change the output method, but I am not
> familiar enough with it to tell you how without looking at a running
> copy.
>

The other thing to try is xvinfo and see what it says.


Re: serious X problem

2010-04-26 Thread Nick Rout
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:57 PM, Barry  wrote:
> Nick Rout wrote:
>>
>>
> 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.


I assume you mean M not k?


>
> '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,

for heavens sake who looks at the splash screen for more than a few seconds?

>and it installed every app known most of which I did not want/need.
> He's still trying, good on you Chris.

The fact is that your distro is broken, and that's why the change is suggested.

You might like to try pclinuxOS which is based on mandrivel, so should
be familiar to you.

http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-pclinuxos-2010-kde

>
> 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.

The point of doing it that way was to get the output and post it back
here (or google on the error) to see what is going wrong. Try posting
the results back.

>
> 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

x11 will be very slow in comparison to xv. I suggest an strace run to
confirm the problem. Then contact mandrivel through their support
channels (I assume they support their users, but last time I looked,
admittedly a long time ago, they were very unfriendly.)

Along these lines, have you updated since installation?

vlc will also allow you to change the output method, but I am not
familiar enough with it to tell you how without looking at a running
copy.


Re: serious X problem

2010-04-26 Thread Barry

Barry wrote:

Nick Rout wrote:

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Nick Rout  wrote:

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Barry  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



 Oops, hit the send button by mistake.
Many thanks to all who replied with suggewstions

Barry


Re: serious X problem

2010-04-26 Thread Barry

Nick Rout wrote:

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Nick Rout  wrote:

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Barry  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