Hi

I dunno what happened - until recently my Ubuntu 9.10 multimedia setup was "perfect"; I could play virtyally any media file on Earth without problems. In addition to the default videoplayer, I also had VLC (latest version) installed...

But then - today all the faces are blue when I play a video. What to do?

Blue. Like smurfs: Ah...can't insert pics here? (Too bad. Would liven things up a bit!)

I had this problem too. Are you using an ATI video card? And then upgraded some drivers? If so, check this link out:

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu...+question/7373

The particular post to pay attention to:
I hope that works.

The easiest way to solve that is just to open Totem media player (Alt+F2 totem or from your menu audio and video -> multimedia player)
then open edit -> preferences, go to the visualization tab and change the "Tonality" bar to either 0% or 100%. It's the one at the bottom.

The change will affect also VLC as well as any other movie player you may decide to use (m-player, whatever).

Please note that since I'm not using an english version of ubuntu I had to translate "on the fly" stuff; actual names for menus and whatever may change a bit...

Just a note, for screenshots you could always use a service like photobucket and link to that.

Much good advice here. Thanks. I simply did like Johnnie said, and turned down the "hue" in the Totem player. After that it's OK.

ATI? Yes, I have ATI integrated graphics, but they're replaced by my new Nvidia card.

I can't remember what I did just before the "smurf problem" appeared. I remember I once had this problem in Windows too. (But I don't remember how I fixed it. I should start making notes!)

Use nvidia. I just installed ubuntu karmic koala with ubuntu perfect script, a pcchips A15G everything is ok except for the totem, the brightness and contrast has no effect.

sudo apt-get remove totem-gstreamer
sudo apt-get install totem-xine

In player xine it works ok. In ubuntu 8.4 was in / home / sillas / .config / totem / xine_config and put what I wanted. In Karmic this file does not exist, but it includes no avail. Any idea?

Are you certain it's the computer and not the monitor? The first thing I would do, if this happened on a desktop and I had a spare monitor, would be to swap the monitors and see if the problem still happened.

If it were a laptop, I'd try jacking in an external monitor and seeing if the problem followed to it.

I have watched lots of people struggle with software for days only to find out that the problem came from hardware.

If it's hardware, all the software fixes in the world won't do a bit of good.

I'm positive, the monitor is fine. This problem started after I installed the karmic koala (installation by the live-cd). Before, I used the Hardy Heron and was ok. Everything was working in totem. In hardy I was able to uninstall the totem-gstreamer and switch to totem-xine, the karmic even following the same steps it does not. Already removed with apt-get and reinstalled and nothing changes.!? The gstreamer-properties does not help. Not even know what to do ...

Besides, you can say the monitor is fine just by looking at any picture. Even on a, say, news site.
They will look fine.
If memory doesn't fail me, I also seem to remember flash (streaming: youtube/megavideo/veoh) videos were fine. The only I had problem with were "local" movies.
Of course I didn't try *every* available format, but I am positive divx and xvid at least posed this issue.
Also, I have a geforce card, so it shouldn't be a driver problem.

lcn_brain: in your first post you speak about brightness and contrast. Did you try the "hue" trick?

I don't no? Is this: in the gstreamer-properties > Video > default output plugin > custom line:
videobalance hue=-1 ! autovideosink and my video turns to red...

I try videobalance hue=0 saturation=50 contrast=-50 brightness=1500 ! autovideosink
Only shows me hue efects and not exist the colour balance in Edit->Preferences->Display

Karmic Koala seems to be doing this a lot. I updated my parents to karmic and had the same problem... You need to adjust the Hue, not brightness and contrast. That should fix the problem

Hi again.

Oh...today my blue faces have returned. + all my videoplayers (VLC, movieplayer/totem and gxine) refuse to play a DivX movie I just downloaded. (Totem says: "need x-rar plugin"......A plugin that it can't find.) (Update: windows can't play it either. Must be a corrupted/really weird file.)

Hmm. A week or two ago everything was fine. Yes, I corrected the blue faces problem temporarily by adjusting the "hue", but now "the blues" has returned. (There's a reason Linux isn't that popular, I guess. Hrmf hrmf.)

Lazy as I am - I'll flip to Windows to watch movies. For now.

This problem only happened in totem and always hapenned in ubuntu (7.10-8.04-9.10). Now I am using xine player (ugly) but is works.
I really prefer totem and I hope fix to fix it.

...I guess one should be more careful when installing things in Linux. I think there must be a logical reason why the "BF" (Blue faces) problem appeared on my system. Really I should take notes about all installs and upgrades that I do.... I recently got a new driver for my video card f.ex. And I've downloaded a lot of updates through the update manager without reviewing exactly what was being installed...

I always install anything in apt-get and then I copy the to archive ubuntu_install.log to control what I been doing.
unfortunately not everything can be found on the Internet and how not support sometimes makes it harder to use Linux