Author Topic: Frequent failure to display video properly  (Read 5267 times)

John@TunerUK

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Frequent failure to display video properly
« on: September 28, 2007, 11:16:33 pm »
Quite frequently I will try to play a video or watch a tv broadcast, only to find that the sound is fine, but the video is totally messed up. It's as if there's some sort of codec missing. A reboot will normally fix this, but it happens so frequently that it's not really an option to just keep rebooting.

Once it happens it affects Xine, Linux MCE, and MythTV. :-\

Anyone got an idea what could be causing this?

Cheers in advance ;)
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John@TunerUK

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Re: Frequent failure to display video properly
« Reply #1 on: September 29, 2007, 01:51:16 am »
Something that has happened to me twice now is, when watching TV, F7 brings up some options on the LinuxMCE GUI. Guide, off, etc. However, on pressing F7, MythTV looses signal lock, and won't regain it unless I reboot. When this happens the stored Videos also mess up as before.
Perhaps this will narrow it down. ???
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John@TunerUK

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Re: Frequent failure to display video properly
« Reply #2 on: September 29, 2007, 02:16:47 am »
Ok, another observation. After watching TV, if I decide to watch a DVD or stored film, there is always at least one, sometimes 2 or 3 blank boxes which are showing up as videos. They seem to be in the same folder that TV shows are recorded in, but I have no recorded TV prog's.
Usually if these are present, you can pretty much forget about watching a film, because clicking on one will again just bring up a scrambled mess, and on occasion it will even totally freeze the machine. :-\
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totallymaxed

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Re: Frequent failure to display video properly
« Reply #3 on: September 29, 2007, 09:13:20 pm »
Quite frequently I will try to play a video or watch a tv broadcast, only to find that the sound is fine, but the video is totally messed up. It's as if there's some sort of codec missing. A reboot will normally fix this, but it happens so frequently that it's not really an option to just keep rebooting.

Once it happens it affects Xine, Linux MCE, and MythTV. :-\

Anyone got an idea what could be causing this?

Cheers in advance ;)

John - When you say your video playback is 'totally messed up' what exactly do you mean? Can you describe what happens and what you get on screen?
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John@TunerUK

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Re: Frequent failure to display video properly
« Reply #4 on: September 30, 2007, 03:26:14 pm »
What I get is either a totally pink screen, or a random mixture of green and yellow pixels. You can sometimes make out shapes, like the info bar on mythtv, but only because there is a definite block of randomness in that shape.
Sometimes, but not often, the window in which it's playing shrinks to the top left corner, and displays a pink block. This usually causes the machine to totally lock up, and I have to power down.

I can take some pictures if it'll help?

As I'm sure you can imagine this makes the machine pretty much unusable for anything other than TV, so if anyone has any suggestions I'd be very grateful.

Here are some other problems I've noticed. They may be unrelated, but it's possible they'll point to something.

1) After using MythTV there are random black boxes in my video library, even when I have no recordings. These go away after a reboot
2) When using MythTV, pressing F7 to show the LinuxMCE GUI will cause a total loss of signal, which can only be fixed with a reboot.
3) If a MythTV recording is in 4:3 ratio, it will be displayed as a box in the middle of the screen when watched back, as if it needs zooming in.
4) Frequently (70%-80% of the time) when using LinuxMCE's GUI to select chapters on a DVD, selecting my chosen chapter will simply send me straight back to the begining of the DVD (Usually the copyright notice)
5) If I rip an album with a lot of tracks on it, I can only select the first page of tracks, there is no way to scroll down the list to the next page (As you can with say movie chapters)
« Last Edit: September 30, 2007, 03:27:59 pm by John@TunerUK »
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tekoholic

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Re: Frequent failure to display video properly
« Reply #5 on: October 02, 2007, 07:55:12 pm »
What I get is either a totally pink screen, or a random mixture of green and yellow pixels. You can sometimes make out shapes, like the info bar on mythtv, but only because there is a definite block of randomness in that shape.
Sometimes, but not often, the window in which it's playing shrinks to the top left corner, and displays a pink block. This usually causes the machine to totally lock up, and I have to power down.

I've just moments ago, finally gotten all the video drivers and configs working (after a week fighting with it...), and I'm having the same issue, of pink, green and yellow scrambled video on DVD.  I cannot, as yet, be sure that my issue is as your's, however, as I've not seen window-shrinking or lockups.  I did leave the TV-capture running (no audio input yet) all night long, because that has locked up the whole machine after 3-30 minutes viewing (realtime, haven't recorded anything yet...).

I'll be looking for other errors, and report what I find...

John@TunerUK

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Re: Frequent failure to display video properly
« Reply #6 on: October 02, 2007, 08:08:04 pm »
Here are some photo's of what's happening on mine.
This happened when tying to watch TV after viewing a video file from LinuxMCE



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tekoholic

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Re: Frequent failure to display video properly
« Reply #7 on: October 06, 2007, 07:05:48 am »
Mine is exactly the same, when it happens.  At this point, I've still not run into the problem of shrinking windows and the like, but nearly everything else you could imagine.

I have, at this point, been forced to give up on this effort for now.  My wife is on me about all the time I've spent on this.  Anyway, here's my post, describing some of the other issues I've had, that make it less than workable for me, at this point:

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2764.0

I wish you all the luck in the world, sir...  Hopefully your attempts will be more fruitful than mine, and I'll see the stories of your success!!!

bluemilk

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Re: Frequent failure to display video properly
« Reply #8 on: October 06, 2007, 08:53:33 pm »
I believe this problem is from the xine video driver xv.  Can you go into kde, launch kaffeine, open a movie and it should messup like you described.  Close that out reopen go to settings -> xine engine parameters ->video -> change the driver to opengl and see if it plays now.  Try a few more if it's not working.  If you get one working go to your pluto admin site change on the media director link, see if you can get it working that way.  good luck.

John@TunerUK

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Re: Frequent failure to display video properly
« Reply #9 on: October 07, 2007, 08:07:33 pm »
I actually gave up and decided on a straight MythTV setup using Fedora 7, with all the MythTV extras.
Once Fedora had updated itself, and mythtv was installed I had it up and running problem free in less than a day.

I'll probably try again with LinuxMCE at a later date :)
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John@TunerUK

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Re: Frequent failure to display video properly
« Reply #10 on: October 09, 2007, 06:51:28 pm »
It would appear that this is due to a fault with the latest nVidia driver (100.14.19). By the looks of it nVidia are on the case :-\
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=98852
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