Arch Linux

gward

Member

Registered: 2012-02-02

Posts: 1

Truncated video playback with vlc and mplayer (nouveau driver)

Hi folks --

I have a rather old (ca. 2003) Toshiba laptop with an nVidia grapics chip. Within the last few days, playing videos with either vlc or mplayer has stopped working. Well, I should say that the bottom 70% or so of video playback has stopped working; the top 30% is still fine. What happens is the bottom of the window is just black.

Here's a screenshot of vlc:

mplayer is basically the same, except the amount of truncation varies a lot more with mplayer -- sometimes the whole window is black, sometimes only the bottom 50% or so is black. vlc *seems* more consistent, FWIW.

I'm using the nouveau driver because it's the only one that works -- nvidia stopped working a few months ago, so I switched to nouveau. I tried nvidia again last night, and it still doesn't work.

Relevant excerpt from "lspci -v":

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34M [GeForce FX Go5200 64M] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device 0001
	Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10
	Memory at c1000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
	Memory at e0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
	Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
	Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
	Capabilities: [44] AGP version 3.0
	Kernel driver in use: nouveau

Package versions (I updated everything and rebooted last night):

$ pacman -Q | egrep 'xorg|nouveau|vlc|mplayer'
mplayer 34426-1
nouveau-dri 7.11.2-1
vlc 1.1.13-3
xf86-video-nouveau 0.0.16_git20120106-1
xorg-appres 1.0.3-2
xorg-bdftopcf 1.0.3-1
xorg-font-util 1.2.0-1
xorg-font-utils 7.6-2
xorg-fonts-100dpi 1.0.1-3
xorg-fonts-alias 1.0.2-2
xorg-fonts-encodings 1.0.4-1
xorg-fonts-misc 1.0.1-1
xorg-fonts-type1 7.4-1
xorg-iceauth 1.0.5-1
xorg-luit 1.1.0-2
xorg-mkfontdir 1.0.6-2
xorg-mkfontscale 1.0.9-1
xorg-server 1.11.4-1
xorg-server-common 1.11.4-1
xorg-server-utils 7.6-2
xorg-sessreg 1.0.7-1
xorg-setxkbmap 1.2.0-2
xorg-xauth 1.0.6-1
xorg-xbacklight 1.1.2-2
xorg-xcmsdb 1.0.3-2
xorg-xdpyinfo 1.3.0-1
xorg-xev 1.1.0-2
xorg-xgamma 1.0.4-2
xorg-xhost 1.0.4-2
xorg-xinit 1.3.1-2
xorg-xinput 1.5.3-2
xorg-xkbcomp 1.2.3-1
xorg-xlsatoms 1.1.0-2
xorg-xlsclients 1.1.2-1
xorg-xmodmap 1.0.5-2
xorg-xprop 1.2.1-1
xorg-xrandr 1.3.5-1
xorg-xrdb 1.0.9-1
xorg-xrefresh 1.0.4-2
xorg-xset 1.2.2-1
xorg-xsetroot 1.1.0-2
xorg-xvinfo 1.1.1-2
xorg-xwininfo 1.1.2-1

Kernel info:

$ uname -a
Linux davros 3.2.2-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Jan 26 08:28:27 UTC 2012 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1400MHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Any suggestions?

Greg

Xwang

Member

From: EU

Registered: 2012-05-14

Posts: 414

Re: Truncated video playback with vlc and mplayer (nouveau driver)

I've the same issue and I don't know how to fix it (my card is an nvidia go5200 32mb which is supported only by nvidia legacy driver which are no more available in arch).
Xwang