puppy crashes with videos
 

Hallo, I installed puppy 431 and 412 (HD frugal) on a Toshiba Satellite 1800-514 with 1 ghz celeron processor, 256 mb ram and 15 gb HD.
when I play mp4 videos with gxine or vlc it tends to crash.
usually after 4 o 5 videos I get a screen with blue and black vertical stripes, the only way to shut down is to press the power botton for 5 seconds.
with win XP no problem.
Please help

Sounds like overheating on a machine that is not powerful enough for continued video playing.

I'd try 2 other Puppies and compare their performance.

1. For superior multimedia support (as far as Puppy goes): Quirky 1.2
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/.../quirky-1.2rc/

2. For best older hardware support: Puppy 214xRC5
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=42553

I did try quirky last week and pup214xrc5 few minutes ago, but same crash.
during the playback I see small horizontal lines on the video and on part of the desktop after crash vertical blue large stripes, again no problem at all with win XP I can play for hours without any issue...
vlc takes 33 % CPU resources in puppy, I don't think it's so overheating

Do I understand correctly?

You are using VLC in Puppy, in all cases? 431, 412, Quirky, 214x?

If yes, then this might be your problem. VLC comes in different versions and they are not all fully compatible with Puppy.
I'd try Quirky with the default player. It should display mp4 videos, at least mine does.

Kindly post the results.

on 412 and 431 I use vlc and xgine, on quirky and pup214xrc5 I used the default media player.

the video memory is shared with ram (16MB) , could it be that 2 applications try to write the same piece of memory?
Edit:
I must correct my self, with quirky it's working fine with the default GNOME Media player!
but VLC won't start.