Kaffeine reports assertion failure, displays horizontal lines

[Andreas Gustafsson]

Binary package hint: kaffeine-xine

When I try to view video (for example, a DVD) using Kaffeine on my Ubuntu 7.04/i386
system, the image is transformed into horizontal lines, as if you took one pixel
from each video line and duplicated it horizontally across the entire window.

If I start Kaffeine from a terminal window, I can see it continously spewing
the following error message to the terminal:

  assert: vo_scale.c:82: _x_vo_scale_compute_ideal_size: Assertion `this->gui_pixel_aspect != 0.0' failed.

I can partially work around the issue by selecting Settings /
xine Engine Parameters / video / Expert Options and checking the
"output_disable_scaling" checkbox. When I do that, I get
a normal picture, except it is not scaled to the window size.

lspci identifies the graphics chipset as:

  01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200]

[Andreas Gustafsson (gson)]

I figured out the cause of the problem. The X server is incorrectly reporting a physical
screen dimension of 0x0 millimeters:

  $ xdpyinfo | grep -C1 millimeters
  screen #0:
    dimensions: 640x480 pixels (0x0 millimeters)
    resolution: -2147483648x-2147483648 dots per inch

This causes a division by zero when kaffeine tries to calculate the display aspect
ratio in KXineWidget::initXine(), which in turn triggers the assertion failure and
causes the corrupt display.

Apparently the incorrect screen dimension is a known issue with the fglrx
driver; see, for example, bug #134142.

The attached patch makes kaffeine work again for me.

[Rich Johnson (nixternal)]

http://websvn.kde.org/branches/extragear/kde3/multimedia/kaffeine/src/player-parts/xine-part/kxinewidget.cpp?r1=700167&r2=737015

This is in the current 0.8.6 release of Kaffeine.