On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Barry <barr...@paradise.net.nz> wrote: > after many failed attempts to view movies I am at a complete loss on > where to search next for a cure to my problem. > > Every time I try to view any movie X crashes requiring a restart and > sometimes locks the kbd. This happens with mplayer and vlc. It follows a > clean install of Mandriva2009.1 The only msg I have is 'Unsupported > pixel format' but can not find anything in the logs after restarting > > Checked the output of 'ldd mplayer', & 'rpm -q -requires mplayer'. All > dependencies appear to be in place. Google produces many replies, none > work. Scrapped the original Xorg.conf, & allowed X to create a new one, > Then tried creating a new one with XFdrake. Have now removed as much as > possible of pulseaudio - still can not play movies. > > The problem does not occur with an install of Mandriva one live for > 2009.0 but this distro has other problems, and an upgrade to 2009.1 > gives a messy system. The box is a Compac NX9040. The same distro runs > fine on my other box which is one I got from Craig / Avonside High, And > I think that install is an upgrade. > > Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. > > Barry >
It is very hard to tell with so little information, and that is probably because of the immediate crash which wipes out your debugging info by crashing X and any xterm you are running from. However IMHO it's likely to be a problem with the X driver. mplayer and most other video players prefer to output via xv which enables some direct interaction with hardware. It is a lot faster than using x11, to the point where many movies will not play smoothly in x11. However it is worth trying: mplayer -vo x11 moviefile.avi to see if it crashes, then the same using -vo xv to see if there is a difference. I see you are ion a notebook with presumably shared RAM between your video system and your OS. Allocate as much ram as possible to video in the bios. By the way if you are having immediate crashes and cannot read the mplayer output, try either starting mplayer from a console, where an X crash won't affect you, or redirect mplayer's output to a file so it survives the X crash. To start from a console, first of all in a terminal within X run xhost + (this is a security risk but unless you have intruders on your lan worry not) then in a console run export DISPLAY=:0 mplayer -vo xv moviefile.avi the movie should play (or crash) in your X screen, but the console will report back all the error messages. The other obvious test is to run another distro from a livecd and see if it will play a movie on your system. You'll probably need to pick a live cd that has access to a good range of codecs (probably chris' sabayon would work well, or pclinuxos perhaps), or pick a movie that has open codecs. I know a lot of first reactions were to put another version of linux on your machine. A few simple tests should isolate the problem before you do anything that radical. I am in two minds about you switching distros. It can be a pain to change and learn new tricks, but frankly I haven't seen much positive about mandrivel in recent times.
