Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

On Apr 28, 2006 06:17 AM, J Sloan wrote:

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Hello all,

What is the secret of getting xgl desktop with working video? I saw the novell demos so I know it's gotta be possible.

I have a Dell GX270 with nvidia card, and it ran suse 10 flawlessly. I did a clean install of 10.1-RC1 since I wanted to see the xgl stuff in action. I did everything as defined in the "Novell cool solutions" article*, and the rotating cube, transparency, and all the other compiz effects are running as advertised. Everything looks great. until I play a video. any video. Playing a realmedia file with realplayer, or an mpeg with xine or mplayer, gives the same result: the X server dies instantly the millisecond that I attempt to play the video.

Is this a known issue? Surely I'm not the only one here who has tried to view a video on an xgl-enabled desktop?

I'm replying to opensuse@ as well, please continue the thread there, if necessary.

I didn't try with an nvidia card, I have Intel on-board video, but I get the same crash when trying to play video with the xv driver. It's because the Intel driver does not have yet the capabilities required. But the nvidia driver does.

Make sure you have these options in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager

DISPLAYMANAGER_XGL_OPTS="-accel glx -accel xv"

If -accel xv does not work for you, try -accel xv:pbuffer

If still not working, open your media player without any movie and set it to use video driver xshm instead of xv.

It will be much slower, but it works for certain. It's the only way to see video on my Intel 915, that does not have fbo or pbuffer capabilities in the driver.

OK, the plot thickens: My Tecra M2 laptop is running 10.1 RC1 and the xgl stuff - it plays all the videos with no problems. The graphics on the laptop is (from lspci): nVidia Corporation NV34M [GeForce FX Go5200 32M/64M] (rev a1) The problematic desktop has the following graphics (from lspci): nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x] (rev a2) An older chipset it seems, and it crashed on every attempted video playback, until some googling turned up some hints leading to successful video playback. If I say "mplayer dancemonkeyboy.mpg" it crashes instantly. However if I say "mplayer -vo x11 dancemonkeyboy.mpg" it plays solidly, whether being dragged around the screen, made transparent, played on the corner between 2 desktops or what have you. So clearly, some finite dimensions of the problem have emerged. I know that for some reason linux vendors won't ship anything capable of playing any popular video format, which might cause this to be disregarded, except that the problem also exists in the real player, which is shipped with suse, when playing *rm files. So, is this already a known issue, or have I stumbled onto something obscure with my particular hardware? Joe

Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

On Apr 29, 2006 01:19 AM, J Sloan wrote:

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Make sure you have these options in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager

DISPLAYMANAGER_XGL_OPTS="-accel glx -accel xv"

If -accel xv does not work for you, try -accel xv:pbuffer

If still not working, open your media player without any movie and set it to use video driver xshm instead of xv.

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However if I say "mplayer -vo x11 dancemonkeyboy.mpg" it plays solidly, whether being dragged around the screen, made transparent, played on the corner between 2 desktops or what have you.

-vo x11 tells mplayer to use xshm. It's slow.

Do you have DISPLAYMANAGER_XGL_OPTS in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager? Did you run SuSEconfig after adding that?

Indeed I did, otherwise I couldn't have gotten compiz and all its nice effects working. Everything was working beautifully, except for video playback.

Alternatively, you could also try -vo gl2 or gl

Yes, I tried gl and gl2, and the video playback area was solid white.

Or -vo sdl (but I'm not sure about this).

I didn't try sdl, I'll check that one. The problem is, the other computer running 10.1-RC1 works perfectly - video playback is fine with the default settings, or with any of the options above. The main difference is a newer nvidia chipset. Joe

Matthias Hopf wrote:

Start Xorg only (no Xgl), and check whether you have Direct Rendering enabled with glxinfo.

If not, check that you are in the 'video' group, if you're using the default configuration.

This is all good, as also evidenced by: #1 The nvidia splash screen on X session startup #2 glxgears gets 1800 fps instead of the 250 it would get otherwise

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However if I say "mplayer -vo x11 dancemonkeyboy.mpg" it plays solidly, whether being dragged around the screen, made transparent, played on the corner between 2 desktops or what have you. -vo x11 tells mplayer to use xshm. It's slow.

Do you have DISPLAYMANAGER_XGL_OPTS in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager? Did you run SuSEconfig after adding that?

Alternatively, you could also try -vo gl2 or gl

Don't use -vo gl2 or gl under Xgl. It will probably always be slower than Xv, and if Xv doesn't work, OpenGL typically won't as well.

Noted, I was checking alternative output methods to get a good set of data points - your later posting seems to address the issues I'm seeing on the problematic machine - thanks for the info. Joe