[mythtv-users] 64-bit Ubuntu 7.10/Mythtv

[Jonathan Rogers]

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Josh White wrote:
> For some reason, I can play a DVD just fine using VLC, but I cannot do it
> with MythDVD.  I believe I can also play the DVD with mplayer (I am away
> from my machine right now, or I would test that belief before stating it).
> I have not changed any of the default MythDVD settings as far as player
> options are concerned (I believe the player setting is set to "internal").
> When I try to watch Live TV from my backend, I get clean audio with
> pink/green squiggly horizontal lines (typically a video codec problem).
> Livetv works fine on my Frontend/Backend machine (running Ubuntu
> 7.10i386).  I had problems viewing .mp4 and .avi files (I'm not
> exactly sure
> what codec they are using, I'm not sure where the .avi's were created, but
> the .mp4 files were created no the same machine when it was running Ubuntu
> 7.04 i386).  I hope this stirs the pot enough to generate some more ideas;
> it has me throughly confused.

In my experience, media players such as mplayer, xine, and MythTV will
either refuse to play a file entirely or show no video in the case of a
missing or malfunctioning codec. I don't think "pink/green squiggly
horizontal lines" are typically a software codec problem.

However, I think you might have a video driver problem. I have Gutsy
(Ubuntu 7.10) running on two machines. My desktop machine has an Nvidia
7900GS based PCIe card an I'm using Nvidia's driver version 100.14.19
from Ubuntu's nvidia-glx-new package. I see green and pink squiggly
lines in a video window at seemingly random times. Whenever I do see
that, I can get the video to show up by switching to a different virtual
console and back without even restarting playback, so I'm guessing it's
a video memory management bug. I think I've only seen this behavior in
fairly recent versions of the Nvidia driver, but it didn't surprise me
much, since I'd seen many odd bugs in previous Nvidia drivers. Playing
video isn't as important on that system as my MythTV one, so I haven't
tried to figure out how to fix it.

I also just upgraded my MythTV system to Gutsy and had a couple of
entirely different video driver problems, though they're resolved now.
That machine has a Radeon 9600 and the Xorg driver.

So, you might want to try using a different driver or different version
and see if the problem persists.

Jonathan Rogers
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