MASTER: xv shows green screen

[Jos Dehaes]

When playing videos using XV on -ati, totem, mplayer, vlc, and other players simply display a blank green screen. Without xv, the green screen is not seen, however there are often other problems.

From reports from various commenters (below), it seems as though there are several different bugs that can produce this set of symptoms. So we are asking people to file separate reports for each case.

You should file a new bug unless all of the following match EXACTLY to an existing bug:

  * Symptoms
  * Steps to reproduce
  * Steps to workaround
  * Chipset ID (down to the PCI ID)

If in doubt, file a new bug and mention the bug ID of the one(s) you think are similar. It is easy for us to dupe multiple bugs together.

Next, follow these steps:

1. Test against Jaunty. It's fine to do this either by a) upgrading, or b) downloading and running the LiveCD (ISOs are at http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/releases/jaunty).

2. See if you can reproduce the issue with Xv. If not, stop here; you're done (unless you want to help test anyway.)

3. Back up your xorg.conf

4. If you still see the issue, take detailed notes of what you see. Please test each case with BOTH mplayer and Totem.

   * What color is the play window?
   * Out of 10 tries, how many times did it show the symptom?
   * What happens if you use Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"? EXA?
   * What happens if Desktop Effects is turned off? on?
   * What happens if AIGLX is disabled? enabled?
   * What happens if you set the depth to 16bpp? 24bpp? 32bpp?
   * Does using x11 instead of xv make the green screen go away?
   * Does changing the AGPMode option help?
     Possible values include 1, 2, 4, 8.
   * Does using Option "VideoKey" "0x01" help?

5. Now you're ready to file the bug. Please follow these steps:

   a) Restore your backup xorg.conf and reboot
   b) Reproduce the issue one time.
   c) Look at 'lspci -nn | grep VGA' to get chipset and pci id.
       Chipset will be something like 7500, HD 2600XT, etc.
       The PCI ID will be the last part in the brackets. like [104c:8023]
   d) Run `ubuntu-bug xserver-xorg-video-ati` to create the bug.
       This automatically includes the files we need.
   e) Title your bug like: "Xv playback shows green screen on [104c:XXXX]"
       Replace XXXX with your PCI ID found above.
       (Include additional symptoms, hw info, etc. in title as relevant)
   f) Paste your answers from step 4 above.
   g) Make mention of this bug, #150519
   h) On this bug, add a comment mentioning your new bug number so
       others can keep track.

[lspci]
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 82845 845 [Brookdale] Chipset Host Bridge [8086:1a30] (rev 04)
     Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Unknown device [1043:1626]
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500] [1002:4c57] (prog-if 00 [VGA])
     Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Mobility Radeon M7 (L3C/S) [1043:1622]

[Mateusz Tybura (wujciol)]

Think about uninstall driver. I worked on 7.04 with Compiz without driver. It works

[Jos Dehaes (jos-dehaes)]

?? Uninstall the radeon driver? Why? Using vesa/vga is not acceptable I think.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

You can at least change the video-output to use X11 not Xv, although that makes it also use more CPU.

You are running gutsy, right?

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Also, please attach xorg.conf, Xorg.0.log and output of 'lspci -vvnn'.

[Jos Dehaes (jos-dehaes)]

Indeed on gutsy. This xorg.conf has the AIGLX off.

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

Yep, just upgraded a Thinkpad T30 (Radeon Mobility 7500) which had been doing Xv just fine with (or without) compiz working. Now I just get a green screen, even when I turn off desktop effects.

I have another ATI-based machine running (G4 Mac Mini, radeon 9200) gutsy in which Xv does work.

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

Hm... I tossed this into my xorg.conf, and still can't get Xv working:
Section "Extensions"
 Option "Composite" "false"
EndSection

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

I also tried this. Still can't get anything other than a blue or green overlay screen when I play videos.

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option "AIGLX" "off"
EndSection

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

I was able to get the video to play again (instead of a big blue square) when I switched from 16 bpp to 24 bpp. (3d accelration is disabled because I only have 16MB of RAM).

And yeah, everything worked just fine in feisty (earlier today) on this exact laptop -- 16bpp+compiz+Xvideo.

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

Confirmed in hardy (using the alpha-1 Desktop CD).

In 32-bit X depth, videos play OK. When switching to 16-bit X depth (using -depth 16 in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf-custom), all that shows up is a green box with no video in it.

[David de Hoog (daviddehoog)]

I've had a number of (seemingly inexplicable) changes in whether or not videos will display on my ATI Mobility 7000 (in my IBM Thinkpad T42). I've been using the radeon driver for Xorg.

Initially, DVDs and AVIs displayed as a shady green box, rather than the video. Sound was fine. Initially thought the problem was codec related.
Disabled compiz - issues remained.
Sometimes (various states, fresh boot, pre-hibernate, post-hibernate, pre-sleep, post-sleep) had various results, sometimes working, sometimes green screen.

I've recently had the blue screen too. Fixed this issue by changing the resolution from 16 bit to 24 bit colour. The change has meant that extended desktop with xrandr (1024x1536) no longer works as the virtual desktop is larger than the card can manage.

[Jonathan Reeve (jon-reeve)]

I'm having this exact same problem, too, running Gutsy with the radeon driver on an ATI Radeon Mobility M6 with 16M memory.

[siriusnova (siriusnova)]

I can confirm this bug on a Thinkpad T30 with an ATI Radeon 7500 Mobility

Any videos i try to play will not work and will only show me a green screen in 16bpp. Happens in VLC, Mplayer, Xine, basically any player trying to use XVideo.

Switch to X11 in VLC Preferences enables video playback, but its still annoying

If I switch to 24bpp videos play, however i lose 3d acceleration.

Any fixes or knowledge of a cause for this bug yet?

I may add this bug also occurs when I use the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XorgOnTheEdge ATI driver, i added the repos and tried using the newer drivers, i still get a green screen in any video playback.

[msiner (msiner)]

I also can confirm this bug on my IBM T42 with ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 32MB.
When I set the depth to 16 bpp I get no XVideo support.
I first noticed the problem when trying to run the game UrbanTerror which errors out when started with SDL errors.
When I switch back to 24 bpp, XVideo and UrbanTerror work.
For those of us with limited memory cards like mine, this can be a drastic bug.
3D game performance is slow using 24 bpp and, as mentioned earlier, virtual screen size is typically not adequate.
So I hope this gets some attention.
Meanwhile, I will try building the hardy ati drivers to see if the problem has been fixed there.
If so, I hope this would at least be a candidate for a backport if not a mainline update.

[msiner (msiner)]

Disabling AIGLX did not seem to solve the problem for me.
I tried building the xserver-xorg-video-ati package from Hardy, but it had build dependencies on the newer xserver, so I abandoned that idea.
I can confirm that installing the xserver-xorg-video-ati binary deb from Feisty works and allows 16 bpp without the problems listed here.
The easiest way to downgrade is download the deb using your browser at packages.ubuntu.com and then open it with the graphical package installer.
That is easier than adding a new repository and going through Synaptic or apt-get.
It seems you will lose some xrandr support that is in the newer radeon driver, but I think that mostly concerns display hotplugging.
If you do downgrade, select the package in Synaptic and use the package menu to lock the version or else the update notifier will constantly remind you that an update is available.
If you do run into any problems, simply unlock the version and upgrade to restore the original drivers (and remember to change your xorg.conf back to 24 bpp).

[Andrew Melo (andrew-melo)]

I can also confirm this bug. I have a radeon M6 LY. 24bpp allows video playback, but no 3d. 16BPP allows the opposite.

[brian (bwelcher18)]

I have been able to get it all to work on a t30 radeon mobility 7500. By all I mean 24 bpp, xv for video in xine and totem and a cube desktop. I do not remember how but it took much searching and tweaking. Attached is the xorg.conf

the fix was in the options for the monitor and the video card section. It does use the radeon driver but by tweaking the options from the default it works well. I forget where I got the settings but it was from several sources. I have left their comments in the xorg.conf

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

I found (today) in hardy that if I set Option "VideoKey" "0x01" in xorg.conf, then the video displays properly in 16bpp.

[Dennis Heinson (dheinson)]

Great. Under which section?

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

Oh, that'll be in the Device section, since it's specific to the radeon driver.

[Dennis Heinson (dheinson)]

Didn't work for me. xorg.conf Devices section:
Section "Device"
 Identifier "Configured Video Device"
 Option "VideoKey" "0x01"
EndSection

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

This is the device section I have in use:

Section "Device"
 Identifier "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]"
 Driver "ati"
 BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
 Option "VideoKey" "0x01"
EndSection

and this is the pci info about the card:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]

[Kim Krecht (kim.krecht)]

(Disclaimer: I have read this bug from the first occurrence of "key". That is comment #23.)

Same here. This bug stems from a change in the -ati driver a few months ago (though I do not remember which upgrade ultimately caused this issue for me). I first suspected different rounding applied to Xvideo colour keys and colours in general to be the culprit here, but actually I am now genuinely unsure, as I found something else as well. Observe:

0x000000: works
0x000001: works
0x000010: does not work (blue)
0x000100: works
0x001000: works
0x010000: works
0x100000: works

Funny, eh? It gets better.

0x000020: works
0x000030: does not work (blue)
0x000040: works
0x000050: does not work (blue)
0x000060: works
0x000070: does not work (blue)
0x000080: works
0x000090: does not work (blue)
0x0000A0: works
0x0000B0: does not work (blue)
0x0000C0: works
0x0000D0: does not work (blue)
0x0000E0: works
0x0000F0: does not work (blue)

And some more:

0x000002: works
0x000020: works
0x000200: does not work (green)
0x002000: does not work (red(!))
0x020000: works
0x200000: works

Rrrrright. Yet more:

0x000300: does not work (green)
0x000400: does not work (green)
0x000500: does not work (green)
0x000600: does not work (green)
0x000700: does not work (green)
0x000800: works
0x000900: works
0x000A00: does not work (green)
0x000B00: does not work (green)
0x000C00: does not work (green)
0x000D00: does not work (green)
0x000E00: does not work (green)
0x000F00: does not work (green)
0x003000: does not work (red)
0x004000: does not work (red)
0x005000: does not work (red)
0x006000: does not work (red)
0x007000: does not work (red)
0x008000: does not work (red)
0x009000: does not work (red)
0x00A000: does not work (red)
0x00B000: does not work (red)
0x00C000: does not work (red)
0x00D000: does not work (red)
0x00E000: does not work (red)
0x00F000: does not work (red)

(Here's hoping that "mplayer -vo xv:ck=set -colorkey $COLORKEY $VIDEO" does the right thing there.) Does anyone see a pattern in this? Maybe an endianness bug?

I do not know how the VideoKey value is expanded to a 24-/32-bit colour specification (is it just appended to 0x0000?), so I cannot comment on that. It even might be different for different chips and/or cards.

gstreamer's xvimagesink seems to use a *hardcoded* colour key of 0x010203, which, well, does not produce the expected results either.

[Dennis Heinson (dheinson)]

That last piece of information might be why it did not work in my case. I use totem which I think relies on gstreamer. Any thoughts? Oh, also: I have my card run at 16bpp for other reasons (24bpp does not seem to work with compiz on 1500x1050 pixels). I read somewhere that changing to 24bpp might solve the issue. But that is no option for me...

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Hmm, I've been able to reproduce this on a R350 9800 ati card after upgrading to Hardy (it worked fine in Gutsy), both with 24bpp set. I see AIGLX is enabled, although I don't recall if that was turned on before with Gutsy. Adding 'Option "VideoKey" "0x01"' to the Device section also made -ao xv work in mplayer. -ao x11 would make playback work, but not scaling.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Fwiw, there may be at least three independent bugs people are seeing, that result in similar misbehaviors. The different bugs can be distinguished by what works around them:

A. Switching 16/24bpp - may be a case of or related to https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13924

B. Adding 'Option "VideoKey" "0x01"'

C. Disabling AIGLX

Possibly the quantity of video memory available is playing a role here.

Anyway, I've asked upstream to take a look.

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

A and B have at times worked on my oldish Thinkpad T30. It's got a radeon 7500 with 16MB of RAM. At 1400x1050@24bpp, GLX is disabled by default because there's not enough RAM for the hardware to support 3D at that resolution and bit depth.

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

BTW, (B) no longer seems to be working as of a week or two ago. I haven't been able to fully investigate because my wife has the laptop and is out of town, but I was able to get her video back by doing (A).

[siriusnova (siriusnova)]

In Addition to above.

A. Switching to 24bpp plays videos but again, no 3d, and many apps will draw slowly because of limited ram (16mb)

B. Adding 'Option VideoKey 0x01 - Does not work for me on my Thinkpad T30 with Radeon 7500 Mobility

C. Disabling AIGLX - Neither does this work for me, disabling the composite extension as well doesn't help

The only thing that HAS worked has been regressing back to the feisty xorg-xserver-video-ati package.

[Andrew Dittes (adittes)]

Just wanted to confirm that this bug is still present in Hardy. I have a Thinkpad X22 with a Radeon Mobility M6 LY (Radeon 7000 based) with 8 MB of RAM.

Following the steps from the above posts:

A. As with the above poster, programs using Xv overlays work fine with 24bpp, but the video RAM is insufficient for DRI.

B. Adding the VideoKey 0x01 option to my xorg.conf solves the problem for VLC and for Mplayer, but not for Totem. I guess Kim's post from March 8 is the reason.

C. Disabling AIGLX and Composite have no effect

Downgrading to Feisty's xorg-xserver-video-ati did not work for me due to dependency conflicts.

I am attaching my xorg.conf, Xorg log, and lspci output.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. In the development cycle for Intrepid there have been some vast improvements in the open source ati video driver and we could use your help testing them. Could you please download the latest Alpha CD image of Intrepid and test this particular bug just using the Live CD? You can find the latest image at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing . Your testing can help make Ubuntu and the open source ati driver even better! Thanks in advance.

[Andrew Melo (andrew-melo)]

@Brian:

Is there a PPA or otherwise I can get the latest driver? My laptop doesn't have a CD drive so LiveCDs aren't options. Thanks.

[Andrew Dittes (adittes)]

I am currently running Intrepid Alpha 4 on the IBM X22 from above. The Live CD automatically detected the Radeon chip and selected 1024x768x24. Interestingly enough, glxinfo claimed direct rendering was enabled, even though this had previously failed at that resolution and depth with Gutsy. Totem played a video using an overlay with no problem in 24-bit mode. However, I was unable to enable Visual Effects.

I modified xorg.conf for a 16-bit depth, and found that the overlay problem still exists with this depth. Videos played in Totem show up as a green block. Visual Effects also do not work with 16-bit color. Here is the output from 'gnome-appearance-properties' when run from the command line and attempting to enable the visual effects:

There is no available graphics driver for your system which supports the composite extension, or the current one already supports it.
Checking for Xgl: not present.
Found laptop using radeon driver.
aborting and using fallback: /usr/bin/metacity

I am attaching the Xorg logs for both 16 and 24 bit color. Please let me know if you need any more information or would like me to try anything.

[Andrew Dittes (adittes)]

By the way, my laptop also has no CD-ROM drive, so I used Unetbootin ( http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ ) to boot the ISO image from my hard drive. It can also make USB drives bootable if your BIOS supports it. I installed the ISO to the same partition Gutsy is installed on. This worked fine and didn't affect my existing install, although it left a lot of files in the root directory.

[Alexander Hunziker (alex-hunziker)]

If one manually switches the acceleration method to EXA, XVideo works even with AIGLX enabled. Add the following line to your xorg.conf:

Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"

I'm using a slightly newer driver from Tormod Volden's PPA, but I guess the one Intrepid ships should work as well. Feedback?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Can others confirm that flipping EXA on solves the problem? Jos?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Flip on EXA in xorg.conf like this:

Section "Device"
   ...
   Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
EndSection

[Mr. Mike (mike-himikeb)]

I have a Thinkpad T30 running Intrepid and see a similar problem - XVideo does not appear.

However, I *think* it might have something to do with the CRTC values and XRANDR.. I have a little script that tweaks some of the xrandr settings, and XVideo starts to work. I created the script fixxv to have the following 3 lines:
#!/bin/sh
xrandr --addmode VGA-0 1024x768
xrandr --output VGA-0 --mode 1024x768

Once those xrandr settings are made, even if you turn off VGA-0 (xrandr --output VGA-0 --off) Xvideo still works..
So it seems that somehow, the XVideo is defaulting to the wrong CRT channel of the video chip, or something like that.
Hope this helps - it's working for me.

PS: Setting the S-video output to 800x600 gives me a great picture on my TV, and it does NOT have to be connected when the computer is booted, for those of you who want to watch movies on your TV (VGA-0 works well, too)

[Andrew Melo (andrew-melo)]

Bryce,

sorry for the delay, I still get green where the XV overlay should be with the following device section:
Section "Device"
    Identifier "Configured Video Device"
    Driver "radeon"
# Option "VideoKey" "0x01"
# Option "GartSize" "128"
    Option "AGPSize" "64"
    Option "AGPMode" "2"
# Option "AGPFastWrite" "false"
    Option "DynamicClocks" "true"
    Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
    Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
EndSection

It is like that with different permutations of the above commented out lines.

thanks.

[Andrew Melo (andrew-melo)]

sorry for the multiple posts, but stripping the device section to just the accelmethod line doesn't work.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Interesting, I mentioned in an earlier comment that it appears this bug is an accumulation of several different issues, that happen to share similar symptoms. Other follow up comments seem to confirm this to be the case.

I think the right thing to do is to break this bug report up into each of the individual bugs, and get them reported upstream so we can get their help in resolving them.

To do this, I'll need your assistance. We'll need you both to help in splitting out the bug reports, and in helping improve the analysis on the issues to a state that will get good results when we report it upstream.

First, how to tell if you should report your bug separately, vs. join on someone else's bug? You should file a new bug unless all of the following match EXACTLY to an existing bug:

  * Symptoms
  * Steps to reproduce
  * Steps to workaround
  * Chipset ID (down to the PCI ID)

If in doubt, file a new bug and mention the bug ID of the one(s) you think are similar. It is easy for us to dupe multiple bugs together.

Anyway, here's the steps to do:

1. Test against Jaunty. It's fine to do this either by a) upgrading, or b) downloading and running the LiveCD (ISOs are at http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/releases/jaunty).

2. See if you can reproduce the issue with Xv. If not, stop here; you're done (unless you want to help test anyway.)

3. Back up your xorg.conf

4. If you still see the issue, take detailed notes of what you see. Please test each case with BOTH mplayer and Totem.

   * What color is the play window?
   * Out of 10 tries, how many times did it show the symptom?
   * What happens if you use Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"? EXA?
   * What happens if Desktop Effects is turned off? on?
   * What happens if AIGLX is disabled? enabled?
   * What happens if you set the depth to 16bpp? 24bpp? 32bpp?
   * Does using x11 instead of xv make the green screen go away?
   * Does changing the AGPMode option help?
     Possible values include 1, 2, 4, 8.
   * Does using Option "VideoKey" "0x01" help?

5. Now you're ready to file the bug. Please follow these steps:

   a) Restore your backup xorg.conf and reboot
   b) Reproduce the issue one time.
   c) Look at 'lspci -nn | grep VGA' to get chipset and pci id.
       Chipset will be something like 7500, HD 2600XT, etc.
       The PCI ID will be the last part in the brackets. like [104c:8023]
   d) Run `ubuntu-bug xserver-xorg-video-ati` to create the bug.
       This automatically includes the files we need.
   e) Title your bug like: "Xv playback shows green screen on [104c:XXXX]"
       Replace XXXX with your PCI ID found above.
       (Include additional symptoms, hw info, etc. in title as relevant)
   f) Paste your answers from step 4 above.
   g) Make mention of this bug, #150519
   h) On this bug, add a comment mentioning your new bug number so
       others can keep track.

Finally, thank you ahead of time for braving this lengthy message. Hopefully, with your help we'll be able to finally put these bugs to rest.

[jean-baptiste (jbateau54)]

I make a new bug report ( bug #365843 )
This bug is specific: old ati cart (7500), free driver (ati) and green screen with deep=16bpp.
I don't test everything but i would.

jb

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I'm closing this bug out at this time; as mentioned in comment #49, this seems to be multiple issues. Follow the directions there for analyzing your issue if you're still seeing this on jaunty and file a new bug.