I am having trouble watching videos using Movie Player. Strangely, youtube videos work fine. It is only when I try to play videos from disk using MoviePlayer* that I get unrecognizably oversaturated videos. I have reset to default settings in MoviePlayer with no improvement. When I alter the sliders for contrast, saturation, etc., in MoviePlayer, the problem improves somewhat but ten minutes later I get a black, unresponsive screen and have to restart :-( I am running Debian Wheezy.

Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!

*VLC no longer works for me, and crashes when opening a video, but plays mp3 fine.

Install

then run

so members can see a little of your specs on your computer.

a link to a computer review of your computer will be helpful also.

also

Does mplayer work?

Well, MoviePlayer (is that Debian's MPlayer? top shows that totem handles my mp3/video files) works fine for audio, and bad video.

Here is LinuxInfo had to say:
3.2.0-4-486 #1 Debian 3.2.68-1+deb7u5
One Intel Pentium M 600MHz processor, 1199.73 total bogomips, 1015M RAM
System library 2.13.0

If you are having troubles with both VLC and with Movie Player (Totem it used to be called), I suspect that something else may be going on.

You could try starting both of the programs from the command line (not at the same time, natch!) and playing something. Perhaps there will be some useful errors thrown to the terminal.

MPlayer gives the error and plays the file:

ERROR: could not insert 'nvidia_current': No such device
[vdpau] Error when calling vdp_device_create_x11: 1



VLC crashes and gives this error:

Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Segmentation fault
lane@dh:~$ Protocol error: bad 3 (Window); Sequence Number 5
Opcode (20, 0) = GetProperty
Bad resource 69206104 (0x4200058)
at -e line 15

I suspect Nvidia is at the root of this. I've never used Nvidia, but persons here have. Which driver are you using--the nouveau driver or Nvidia's drivers? That's the first question you'll be asked.

I did find an article on the Arch wiki about vdpau: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VDPAU

Do I have an NVIDIA device? My GPU is made by Intel:

VGA compatible controller : Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device

Or does NVIDIA run on that?

please post the output of

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
Subsystem: Fujitsu Technology Solutions Device 1033
Kernel driver in use: i915
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
Subsystem: Fujitsu Technology Solutions Device 1033
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)

i don't think you have a second graphic card in there, your hardware is too old for that, but just to be on the safe side, also checkif that doesn't reveal anything important, my guess is that both your media players are misconfigured.
i suggest moving/renaming their config files/directories and try again.

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
Subsystem: Fujitsu Technology Solutions Device 1033
Kernel driver in use: i915
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
Subsystem: Fujitsu Technology Solutions Device 1033
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
Subsystem: Fujitsu Technology Solutions Device 1033
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)

i took great care to phrase my previous question in a way that makes it clear that you yourself should take a look at the output, not me.
in any case, no nvidia anywhere.

which brings me to the latter half of my previous post.
how about that?

and anyway, is there anything that you are not telling us that could explain why mplayer is asking for an nvidia card?

in vlc, there's a setting somewhere to not use hardware accelaration. try that.

A previous poster here asked about mplayer, so i started using it instead of MoviePlayer (actually Totem).
Trial and error with mplayer settings revealed that the problem had to do with the drivers. When I tried:
mplayer -vo xv
video worked normally! :-)

Now I will try to find out how to globally set all players to use xv. MoviePlayer, VLC, and mplayer had been equally affected.

So can suggest how I can set xv as my default for all video players?