mplayer and xine crash X hard, VLC working fine

[chosokabe]

Hi!

I just did a fresh install of Fedora 11 on my system (64 bit architecture, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor). It's all very nice, but any attempt to run Xine or Mplayer crashes the X server immediately. The mouse will still move, but nothing responds to clicking. Can't switch to other terminals with Ctrl-Alt-Fn keys, Ctrl-Alt-Bckspc does nothing.

Running from a terminal produces no error messages, possibly because the screen freezes too fast to see them.

I can log in and restart from ssh, but that's about it.

VLC, on the other hand, seems to work fine, with the exception of a slight stutter in the sound quality at the beginning of a video--making me wonder if this is something related to pulse audio.

Xine -A alsa still produces a crash, however.

I'd like to report this as a bug, but since it happens in xine and mplayer, I'm not quite sure what to report it under. Any suggestions? More specifically, does anyone have any idea what Xine and Mplayer have in common that VLC does not?

Edit: Turning Compiz on or off doesn't make any difference either.

[toriver]

I'm having a similar problem with both MPlayer and VLC, but only when I try to watch in fullscreen. The audio on all my videos (no matter which program or filetype I am using) also stutters in the first few seconds, and video then slows down and lurches forward to catch up with the audio track, then all is normal. I haven't tried xine yet, though.

[chosokabe]

Torvier,

Can you switch to another console with Ctrl+Alt+F5 (for example), or restart the X session with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace? I'm just trying to make sure it's the same kind of lock-up.

I noticed the stuttering in VLC as well, but that's a minor problem for me at the moment. Xine and Mplayer can't even run, and I've recently discovered that Xsane seems to produce the same result. I'm going to do some more work on this today, so I'll post back if I figure anything out.

Meanwhile, I forgot to say in the original post that I'm just using the auto-configured Xorg.conf, and my video card is an Intel 82Q963/965 Integrated Graphics Controller.

[chosokabe]

Still not sure if Toriver and I are having the same problem, but I discovered that the issue I'm running into can be resolved quickly by turning off kernel modesetting.

If you think you might be experiencing this same problem, you can test by turning off modesetting temporarily at startup.

To do this:

1) Reboot your computer and hold down the Ctrl button. This should bring up the grub boot menu. If you see the login screen, you've gone too far.

2) hit 'a' to bring up the kernel command line\
3) add "nomodeset" (no quotations) to the end of the line.
4) hit enter

You should see a weird little blue and white bar go across the screen as fedora boots. After that the login screen will come up, and you should be able to login normally. If you can watch videos without any problems now, kernel modesetting was probably the culprit.

As a non-expert in kernel modesetting, I have no idea what advantages it offers other than giving you a shinier bootup screen, but there is a page about it here.

If turning it off makes your life better and you want to do it permanently, just put the nomodeset command into your grub configuration file like this:

1) su - [or sudo]
2) enter root password
3) gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf
4) grub.conf will open in a text editor
5) look for lines that start with "kernel" and probably ends with "rhgb quiet" unless you removed it. (There are probably between 1-3 of these lines).
6) add "nomodeset" (without quotations) to the end of these lines
7) save and close

If someone who knows something about modesetting tells you that you need it, listen to that person and not me.

[chosokabe]

I almost forgot. I submitted a bug report for this here.

[handleyj]

The nomodeset setting works for me as well. Now of course, I'm having audio issues.

Anyway, chosokabe: the link to your bug doesn't work. I was going to add a comment there. What's the bug number (or some other way I can find it)?

Thanks!

[chosokabe]

Oops, sorry. I edited the link so hopefully it works now. The bug number is 505418, just in case it doesn't.

[LeFou]

I'm running into this on a relatively-new F11 installation. What is the status. I found something that said disable DRI in xorg.conf, and that didn't help.
I did the nomodeset from this thread and that didn't help.
Mine doesn't freeze or disable, it just restarts X immediately upon playing a video with mplayer.
driver is "intel"

incidentally VLC fails in the same way

[LeFou]

ok, I disabled compositing in metacity so mplayer doesn't make X crash anymore. Xine still does, and I'm tired of logging back in so I'm not checking VLC right now.
But audio is *way out of sync

Also a few minutes into some (.flv) videos, it starts going
[flv @ 0x8716aa0]skipping flv packet: type 64, size 4211711, flags 0
... repeats something like this 40-50 times, then says

Exiting... (End of file)

even though it's only about a third of the way through