Arch Linux

iru

Member

Registered: 2009-09-15

Posts: 17

VLC fullscreen dims the screen [solved... kinda]

I tried searching for "vlc fullscreen" on the forums, but nothing useful showed up so...

Whenever I try to go into fullscreen with vlc, the first time I double-click the vlc window, the video screen simply turns black and it doesn't change into fullscreen mode. I'm still on my desktop, the video doesn't show up in the vlc window although it keeps playing, i.e. the sound keeps playing. When I double-click the window once again, the video shows up again, but the screen gets dimmed to a certain degree. Doing the whole procedure again it gets darker and darker every time until I can't see anything anymore. Killing vlc doesn't bring the brightness back to normal. I can change to a console with ctrl+alt+f1 f.ex. and the brightness will be normal there, so I'm assuming it's something weird with my xorg.conf, but I really have no idea what exactly causes it. The problem doesn't occur with other players like mplayer/smplayer. And yes, I do need vlc cause I like to play dvds saved as iso with it which doesn't work too good in mplayer.

Help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

EDIT: Forgot to mention. I'm using pekwm as window manager if that helps

Last edited by iru (2010-04-17 16:07:36)

iru

Member

Registered: 2009-09-15

Posts: 17

Re: VLC fullscreen dims the screen [solved... kinda]

Bump

iru

Member

Registered: 2009-09-15

Posts: 17

Re: VLC fullscreen dims the screen [solved... kinda]

I know it's my third post in a row, but maybe you guys need more input. I figured out the cause of the problem now. It's xcompmgr that I use to let my pekwm menu drop a shadow. I started vlc through a terminal and checked its ouput when I left fullscreen mode again:

[????????] x11 video output error: X11 request 42.0 failed with error code 8:
BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)

I realised it must have been xcompmngr when I noticed that there was still a bright border at the screen edges and that vlc menus still had the original brightness so to say. I killed the xcompmgr process and the brightness went back to normal. vlc works fine too then. I still don't understand though why mplayer doesn't have a problem with this.

Does this breakthrough help anyone of you figuring out how I could get rid of the problem, i.e. use vlc with xcompmgr? =>
I checked the forums again with this new knowledge, without success unfortunately.

camio

Member

Registered: 2010-04-10

Posts: 1

Re: VLC fullscreen dims the screen [solved... kinda]

I know this is probably way too late, but I just ran into this problem using arch and Awesome wm.  What fixed it for me was changing the output of vlc to X11 video output. 

This option can be found under: Tools->Preferences->Video->Output.

Afterward fullscreen worked as it did before I installed xcompmgr.

iru

Member

Registered: 2009-09-15

Posts: 17

Re: VLC fullscreen dims the screen [solved... kinda]

Unfortunately I already used X11 video output so I'm guessing this won't do it for me. Thanks anyway for your reply.

Edit: I've recently changed to fluxbox and the problem just vanished. Guess it's not really a fix for pekwm, but I'm happy as long as I can use xcompmgr and still watch videos.

Last edited by iru (2010-04-17 16:07:14)