Hello,

When I enable the desktop effects in kde 4.2.4 my videos stop working. I get a blank screen whenever I play any video. Also my screen goes blank for about a second whenever I login.

I am using an ATI Radeon (X1200) video card.

Please advice.

Thanks

If you have mplayer installed, try entering "mplayer -vo help" to list the various video output drivers.
Some to try are:
[code]
xv X11/Xv
x11 X11 ( XImage/Shm )
gl X11 (OpenGL)
gl2 X11 (OpenGL) - multiple textures version
sdl SDL YUV/RGB/BGR renderer (SDL v1.1.7+ only!)nd
Try to play the videos with different output drivers. E.G. mplayer -ao xv video.mpg

The mplayer and gmplayer programs will look in a configuration file which may indicate a video output driver that doesn't work for you.

Make sure you try "mplayer -vo gl2 <video>". If it doesn't work, it could indicate a problem with the GL video drivers. I think that other drivers could be effected if you use compositing. I had a similar problem when compiz was new. Updating my nvideo drivers fixed the problem, if I am remembering correctly.

I tried playing the video using different video drivers in xine and 'xshm' worked.

xine -V xshm <Video-file>

Is there any way I can configure xine to use this driver by default.

You can specify it in ~/.mplayer/config

If you use xine, you can set it in the graphical configuration, or in the config file in ~/.xine/. I think the file is xine.conf, but I don't remember for certain. The xine config file is well commented, and shows all of the possible drivers you can select to be the default.

You might still want to look into the GL issue. I think that you may not have acceleration working. Do the desktop effect work smoothly?

The config file for xine is ~/.xine/config. I changed 'video.driver:auto' to 'video.driver:xshm'. Now the videos are working.

My desktop effects are working smoothly.

Also if I switch from kde to xfce the videos work with the default driver.