Occasional Blank Video

[tyrrell]

Hi all, I'm having a problem with viewing video files and streams on my FC4 machine (although this same problem occurred on Mandrake 10 also--so maybe it's hardware related). Sometimes when I try to open a video file (avi or mpg; in totem or mplayer) or view a video stream (such as from my tv tuner; in tvtime) the video is blank (black) but the audio still plays.

If the video shows up blank, I could retry a few hours later and it will (sometimes) work. This happens regardless of software, user (i.e. root does not help), time of day, and file/stream. It's about a 50/50 chance it will or will not work. I can't seem to correlate the symptoms with any other activity--maybe someone else has come across this problem? I've searched many places and come up empty. My machine specs follow...many thanks in advance!

$ uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.15-1.1833_FC4 #1 Wed Mar 1 23:41:37 EST 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

(I have a Radeon 9200 video card with the latest Linux drivers from ATI's website.)

$ lspci | grep ATI
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200] (rev 01)
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200] (Secondary) (rev 01)

[twiistedkaos]

Hmm,... Doens't happen with me... It's possible that it's a driver related problem and your card isn't completely supported with linux I suppose. Either that or the codecs that you are using aren't the best / most updated version.