[g]xine distorts video; mplayer works fine

quiescere · 12-29-2007, 11:54 AM

I'm having trouble playing video on my Slackware laptop. I first noticed trouble with embedded video under firefox. Navigating to a page with embedded video would cause the system to bog down horribly while xine loads, and once loaded video would not display properly. Thus, I ran some tests.

Using gxine from the command line did not work at first, complaining that libmozjs.so was not found. Adding /usr/lib/firefox (itself a symlink to the current version of the firefox libs) to ld.so.conf and rerunning ldconfig fixed that problem, but I was surprised it was necessary. After that, I tried again. This time, I got no errors in the terminal window, but as when run from firefox, the system slowed to a crawl and the video was both very choppy and composed entirely of lurid green and purple. I tried xine from the command line, and again no error messages appeared. However, in this case the video appeared repeated three times, with blank lines in between the video lines. (Thus, three times as wide as it should be and twice as high.) The colours were correct, though. O joy.

After searching the forums a bit I installed the mplayer codecs via SlackBuilds.org. This made no difference in the [g]xine behaviour. Finally, I installed mplayer, again via SlackBuild. It works flawlessly.

I want to know the following: why gxine and xine behave differently, why each of them is wrong, and why mplayer is working properly. I'm also a bit curious if other people have had to modify their ld.so.conf to get gxine to work when not called by firefox.

I'm running a mostly stock Slackware 12 system. I've a few SlackBuilds and a hand-rolled kernel, but nothing fancy. I have an ATI Radeon Mobility card, but am using the vesa framebuffer.

Not that it should matter, as the problem appears similarly with different video formats, but the video I'm using as a test is
http://www.hulahooper.com/films/fatb...ngie_jeans.wmv

Any help, suggestions, etc. are much appreciated----
quiescere

Alien_Hominid · 01-01-2008, 02:45 PM

What's your win32 codecs location path? xine might be looking at /usr/lib/win32 while codecs are located at /usr/lib/codecs.

Run xine-check. It will check your configuration. You should notice that the file is wmv (windows media video) and the codec might not be perfect.

quiescere · 03-30-2008, 03:11 PM

Obviously I back-burnered this problem for a while, but yesterday when attempting to play an audio CD I ran into more problems.

Again:

Slackware 12.0, mostly stock with a couple of Slackbuilds and a custom kernel.
VESA framebuffer (yes, I know, but my video card listed below is old)
Xfce
Dell CPx H 500 GT:
PIII 500MHz
128 MB
ATI Rage Mobility M1 (essentially the Mach64 core, I think)
8 MB Video

To the symptoms listed earlier I now add:

When starting xine with no parameters, the video window displays "There is no MRL." in the title bar.
Rather than being blank or displaying a logo, the video window displays coloured horizontal bars, suggestive of a distorted logo.
Closing the video window via the control in the title bar rather than via xine command crashes X.
Playing a CD gives no errors and the counter increments as if playing, but there is no sound. (Workbone plays the CD just fine.)

/dev/cdrom is properly linked to hdc and DMA is on:

Code:

hdparm /dev/cdrom

/dev/cdrom:
 IO_support    =  0 (default 16-bit)
 unmaskirq     =  0 (off)
 using_dma     =  1 (on)
 keepsettings  =  0 (off)
 readonly      =  0 (off)
 readahead     = 256 (on)
 HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

The paths in xine appear fine to me, alsa sound is selected, everything seems reasonable. xine-check reports no major problems apart from not having a DVD drive and processing all video in software:

Code:

xine-check
Please be patient, this script may take a while to run...
[ good ] you're using Linux, doing specific tests
[ good ] looks like you have a /proc filesystem mounted.
[ good ] You seem to have a reasonable kernel version (2.6.21.5)
[ good ] intel compatible processor, checking MTRR support
[ good ] you have MTRR support and there are some ranges set.
[ good ] found the player at /usr/bin/xine
[ good ] /usr/bin/xine is in your PATH
[ good ] found /usr/bin/xine-config in your PATH
[ good ] plugin directory /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.1.7 exists.
[ good ] found input plugins
[ good ] found demux plugins
[ good ] found decoder plugins
[ good ] found video_out plugins
[ good ] found audio_out plugins
[ good ] skin directory /usr/share/xine/skins exists.
[ good ] found logo in /usr/share/xine/skins
[ good ] I even found some skins.
[ good ] /dev/cdrom points to /dev/hdc
[ hint ] /dev/dvd is /dev/dvd, not a DVD device
         /dev/dvd is the default device that xine uses for playing DVDs.
         You could make your life easier by creating a symlink named /dev/dvd
         pointing to your DVD device (something like /dev/scd0 or /dev/hdc).
         If your DVD-ROM device is /dev/hdb (slave ATAPI device on primary bus),
         rm /dev/dvd
         ln -s hdb /dev/dvd
         typed as root will give you the symlink.
         Alternatively, you can configure xine to use the real device directly,
         using the setup dialog within xine, but I can't check your DMA
         settings in that case...
         press <enter> to continue...

[ good ] found xvinfo: X-Video Extension version 2.2
[ hint ] Your X server doesn't support YV12 overlays.
         That means xine will have to do color space transformation and scaling
         in software, which is quite CPU intensive. Maybe upgrading your
         X server will help here.
         If you have an ATI card, you'll find accelerated X servers on
         http://www.linuxvideo.org/gatos/
         press <enter> to continue...

[ hint ] Your X server doesn't support YV12 overlays.
         That means xine will have to do color space transformation and scaling
         in software, which is quite CPU intensive. Maybe upgrading your
         X server will help here.
         If you have an ATI card, you'll find accelerated X servers on
         http://www.linuxvideo.org/gatos/
         press <enter> to continue...

[ hint ] Your X server doesn't have any XVideo support...
         XVideo is an X server extension introduced by XFree86 4.x. This
         extension provides access to hardware accelerated color space
         conversion and scaling, which gives a great performance boost.
         If you have a fast (>1GHz) machine, you may be able to watch all
         kinds of video, anyway. You will waste lots of CPU cycles, though...
         press <enter> to continue...

I'm at a loss. At this point I don't even know what questions to ask. Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks----
quiescere