When I try to play a video, in both xine and mplayer, the video appears to have blue dots scattered all over it. I suspected this was a problem with Beryl, so I restarted KDE without it and Emerald. The movies played perfectly. Then I started Beryl and Emerald again. I noticed that when I was using Beryl, if the only window on the desktop was mplayer or xine, the blue dots disappeared. I don't want to have to minimize all apps while playing videos, and I still want to run Beryl. How can I make the blue dots go away? I'm running Beryl using AiGLX and Kubuntu Edgy. The problem happened with any type of video format I tried.

anyone solved this problem? i'm having the exact same problem, plus if the xine/mplayer/whatever window doesnt have focus it goes blue.

Some video drivers, as it turns out, don't seem to work right with Beryl (at least on a few lucky computers). Try switching the video driver that your favourite media player uses over to "gl", or "gl2". Those drivers made the dots go away for me.

X11/Xshm works too.

When I had this problem, I changed the bpp from 16 to 24bpp and no more blue dots when using -vo xv.

Change:

DefaultDepth 16

to:

DefaultDepth 24

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Thanx dude!! i was tryin to figure out a solution n luckily i found this post....thanx a lot!! i've changed it to X11/xshm and it works perfect

I too had these weird grid blue rectangular dots on a green background grid ... on the right 2/3rds of my screen. It happened when I played some video clips that I'd copied off my TV video card long ago. It also shows up on some old AdCritic.com commercials. They were very funny so I wanted to keep them. So I came up with the following command:

mplayer -vo x11 -zoom -xy 3 -framedrop movie-whatever.mov

This bypasses the hardware video drivers (that seem to be at fault somehow) and uses -vo x11 for output. That creates a problem since you can't scale the video anymore. Fix this with -zoom (turns on software scaling) and -xy 3 makes the tiny images big enough to see without reading glasses. This creates another problem since the audio and video get out of sync on slow machines (like mine). So turn on -framedrop.

Now I can watch my ancient video clips again!!

Note to -bpp 24 suggestion above...I couldn't make that solution work.

I use MPlayer SVN-r29779-4.3.3 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team and
Linux 2.6.28-17-generic #58-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 1 18:57:07 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux and
VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc RV610 LE AGP [Radeon HD 2400 PRO AGP]