video playback distortion problem under all players

aeugler · n00b Joined: 09 Dec 2004 Posts: 10 Location: Germany

hi everybody,

i have a strange video playback problem. some videos have horizontal stripes on the right side of the picture. some videos only have them in windowed mode, they disappear when i switch to fullscreen. some videos have no problems at all, i think all the mpg videos work fine. with the other videos i didn't find a system, which play correct and which won't. i did not have this problem all the time but i can't remember if it first occured after upgrading my kernel or upgrading xorg or anything else. it occurs under all players (mplayer,xine,vlc,totem), it doesn't occur, if i put in a live cd of any linux distribution, so it should definitely be solveable, but i have no clue where to start....
any hints would be appreciated

my system:
kernel 2.18-r2
matrox g400 (i tried both, kernels with matrox support and without it)
if you want more information, ask for it.

greetings
äugler

hede · Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 8:52 am Post subject:

Did you tried different video output drivers with mplayer? "-vo x11" should work even if accelerated output is buggy.
Use "mplayer -vo help" at the command line to get a list of supported drivers.
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aeugler · n00b Joined: 09 Dec 2004 Posts: 10 Location: Germany

yes, i tried all the available ones. "-vo x11" does work without the distortion but does not scale to fullscreen. That means, when i go to fullscreen mode, the picture stays at original size and the rest of the screen just gets black.
The options "-vo mga" or "-vo xmga" do not work, because the device "/dev/mga_vid" does not exist.

hede · Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 8:06 am Post subject:

vibrokatana · Guru Joined: 09 Feb 2006 Posts: 328 Location: o0o0oo

I remember seeing a output option for matrox in man mplayer, it was pretty well down toward the bottom of the beast of a manual tho.
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aeugler · n00b Joined: 09 Dec 2004 Posts: 10 Location: Germany

thanks for the hints, i tried "-vo x11" with softwarescaling and it works, but is too slow for my machine. i finally also got the matrox mga_vid driver to work. i had to download it from http://attila.kinali.ch/mga/ and compile the module by myself. now it seems to work in fullscreen mode, i still have distortion in windowed playback, but after switching to fullscreen, everything works fine so far.

this is better than before, but yet not perfect, since all other video players don't work correctly and i only have a clear picture in fullscreen. i'm still wondering what's the cause of the problem. anyway, it seems to be a problem of the hardware unspecific accelerated video playback, thats a point to start from. i will do some research by myself, but if anybody has any ideas, i'd still be happy to hear them :-)