Fedora16 - playing videos cause X window crash
 

Ever since upgrading to F16 I cannot play videos (with xine, vlc, DragonPlayer ...) without getting an X window crash. Starting xine crashes X windows instantly. With vlc, the program will start but crashes when you load a video (but you can play mp3's). By crash I mean the screen goes black and X windows restarts and I get the gdm login box again.

I have an ATI RV620 LE [Radeon HD 3450] video card using the fglrx driver with Cataylst version 11.11 The problem has persisted through several kernel upgrades (currently running 3.2.2-1.fc16.x86_64).

Other details:
o youtube videos play fine
o can video play with xine, vlc etc inside a vncviewer window (connected to same machine) - I know that the graphics capability using vnc is reduced compared to a regular desktop and apparently this is avoids the bug.
o crashes happen in all window managers I've tried: KDE, gnome3, LXDE
o crashes occurs whether or not the "Tear Free Desktop" option is enabled.

Any suggestions?

Configure your video players to use GL output instead of Xv. This is a known bug with fglrx and 1.10/1.11 X servers.

Adam

Worked!
 

Thanks for the tip which worked. However, it was difficult to reconfigure xine because its gui menu to select the video driver does not work, and hangs when you try to scroll the menu, after which you must kill xine. I had to change xine's driver by editing ~/.xine/config directly, which worked.