When watching movies in totem on my new Ubuntu installation, I often get coloured flashes at the bottom of the screen - the bottom 20 scanlines or so get covered with garbage for a frame or so. Sometimes it's a rare flash and sometimes it's consistently flickering, I'm yet to see a pattern.

I noticed it in totem-gstreamer, since it's ubuntu's default, so I tried installing totem-xine - no help. It's also not the fault of totem, since xine-ui also has the problem. So it's probably the fault of whatever library they're both using to read from the file (I'm guessing ffmpeg? I did have to install that package before the movies would work) though it could be something further up like the display driver or something... though I haven't seen any problems like this outside the movie window.

Details from synaptic:
totem 1.0.1-0ubuntu1
gstreamer 0.8.8-1ubuntu4
libxine 1.0-1ubuntu3.2
ffmpeg 3:0.cvs20050121-1ubuntu1
xorg-driver-fglrx 6.8.0-8.8.25-0ubuntu11 (for my ATI Radeon 9600+ XP)

[edit]
I just installed MPlayer, and I haven't seen the artifacts in that yet, but I still rather the UI totem has - I'm not exactly a linux power-user just yet... so I'd still like to get totem working without these distracting flashes...

[edit again]
I found gmplayer, so I'm happy for now. Looking through the video preferences, if I use the "xv" video driver I get the flashes, but other ones don't seem to. So I have my movies without the flashes, but it seems like the problem is deeper...

Something wrong with the ATI drivers I guess.... make sure you have the latest version, maybe.

glxinfo should say direct render: yes

I suspect codec issue though which mplayer probably added.

You might want to try out another player or video to make sure it isn't just a program specific problem. I recommend giving xine a spin, never had any problems with it.

Everything is the latest version according to synaptic

Yep

I'm not surewhat you're saying here - I had the problem even before I installed mplayer.

As I said, I tried gstreamer (with totem and gst-launch-ext), xine (with totem and xine-ui) and mplayer, only mplayer works and even then only if I don't use the "xv" driver, the "gl" driver works (I haven't tried any of the others extensively yet)

[edit]
I just saw that gst-launch-ext chooses "xvimagesink" - so I'm guessing xv is the problem, whatever it is...