I don't know if it's just because I'm running Gnome with amarok, but the OSD has some serious issues.
I run a dual monitor setup using nVidia binary drivers and twinview with compiz enabled. If I watch a video, on either screen, full screen or otherwise, then sometimes the video playback goes weird: 1. Imagine dividing video window into a grid at roughtly 20pixel increments. 2. Now number the blocks 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 etc. 3. Now picture a combination of blocks turning black, eg. all the 1s, or all the 1s,2s and 3s, or just the 2s and 4s, but only for a fraction of a second. This happens when I scroll quickly in firefox using the scroll bar - not the mouse wheel - I assume it's due to every nth bit of the video memory being stolen from video overlay to redraw the 3d desktop. I can cope with it in Firefox, because it only happens when scrolling and only in some cases. The pain in the butt is amaroK. If amaroK is running (at all - even with music stopped, minimised to tray (or not)) then this flickering happens constantly. However if I disable the OSD in amaroK, it stops happening. (nb. the OSD only appears while playing music, and only for a few seconds (or whatever you set it to) at the start of each song - it just displays the song name as sort of a giant semitransparent tool tip wherever you like on the screen. My hypothesis is that whoever coded the OSD in amaroK did a really lazy job and the OSD is polling the screen like I'd expect a java app to do, hence it's trying to redraw every clock cycle, even if it's not being used (ie, blank). Alternatives theories are some kind of weirdness in it being a KDE app and trying to talk to Gnome, specifically Gnome running compiz on nVidia binary drivers while running TwinView - and probably doing the dishes as well :-P How should I go about further troubleshooting this, or should I just go to amaroK and ask them? -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
