Intermittent Video Playback Issue in Gutsy with NVIDIA restricted driver

[Matthew Craig]

Intermittently, upon play back of videos, the player will show green and scrambled graphics instead of the regular video. This is monitor specific, with dual monitors, based on which monitor the video window originates. Upon moving the video back and forth between the two monitors, the video goes from good to bad to good again. Sometimes, one monitor will show a still image of the video, while the other shows the scrambled green. Sometimes, one monitor will consistently fail to show a video, while the other monitor will consistently succeed in showing the video. Sometimes, both monitors will consistently fail.

When the video player is dragged to a second monitor, the video freezes or goes scrambled green. When the video is dragged back to the original monitor, the video plays normally. The video can be between the two screens and only the part of the video on the original monitor will play.

I am using the new Gutsy (AMD64), with the Ubuntu-supplied restricted NVIDIA driver 100.14.19, I configured my two Dell 2005WP / 2007WP monitors with the Screen and Graphics tool, and I am having the problem with both Totem, Xine, and Firefox embedded video. This happens with all codecs, including OGG theora.

This problem only started occurring after upgrading to Gutsy.

I tried switching out gstreamer, codecs, and the totem player. None of these made a difference. So, I have concluded it must be the new Ubuntu NVIDIA driver, by process of elimination.

A work around is restarting the X display.

Someone else noted this same issue on the Forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=599581

[edschofield (schofield)]

I am seeing videos with dodgy color maps too in Gutsy AMD64, but I have an Intel G965 graphics chipset. My videos come out mostly green and black, with patches of purple. Restarting the PC seems to fix the problem (but I need to verify this properly). I am wondering if the bug is triggered by X resuming from Suspend-to-RAM? I'll try to test this too ...

[syko21 (syko21)]

I have a single monitor setup on my laptop and I find this issue occurs intermittently. I have noticed that restarting X fixes the issue but if I restart X and open firefox before playing the video it scrambles again.

[Matthew Craig (matthew-t-craig)]

Could this be the fix ??? I made the configuration change and will update this bug in a few weeks.

Hi,
I had a similar problem and I solved it like this:

1) run gstreamer-properties
2) click on the video tab
3) in Plugin select X Window System (No Xv)

alfredo

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=615539

[Matthew Craig (matthew-t-craig)]

This fix absolutely fixed the problem. I no longer see videos that freeze the first frame or suddenly get the green scramble. I wish I knew more about what was happening behind the scenes of gstreamer-properties, because I'd like to give a more concise answer to this bug-fix, but this is the fix.

I hope this bug-fix will get some attention.

[Matthew Craig (matthew-t-craig)]

<MikeS> from that description: the Xv support in your driver is buggy. You're now using X directly (not Xv) which avoids the problem, but it's much slower. It doesn't sound like a gstreamer bug.

-- #gstreamer chatlog

[syko21 (syko21)]

I installed gstreamer0.10-sdl and then set the gstreamer-properties value to SDL which fixed the problem and I haven't noticed a performance hit yet. I played back an HD 720p video with no slowdowns.

[Matthew Craig (matthew-t-craig)]

There are two people commenting here having the same problem. Marking #162343 as Confirmed.

[Matthew Craig (matthew-t-craig)]

After installing the -sdl and applying, Totem did not zoom at least two XVID videos, and so I switched back.
SYKO21, are you also using NVIDIA drivers? Can you confirm which version?

[syko21 (syko21)]

Im using the drivers in gutsy, the nvidia-glx-new package. Installed using restricted driver manager.

[Even Nedberg (nedberg)]

Same problem on Kubuntu Gutsy with Nvidia driver and dual monitors. Sometimes working on both monitors, somtimes only one monitor, somtimes no monitor. Restarting X fixes it for a while...

[einfach (freu-dich)]

I notice the same funny behaviour than Even Nedberg.

Sometimes video is normal on both screens.
Sometimes the screen with vga is ok and when I put totem in the middle of both screens the dvi screen is scrambled and vga not.
Other times video plays some minutes and then suddenly scrambles. (But The screenshot-option of totem brings normal pictures of the video playing.)

This problem is on totem vlc and also on flashplugin-nonfree of firefox 2.0.0.10

I use a Nvidia Winfast PX 6600 with 128MB videomemory.
The processor is intel dualcore with 2GB RAM.

[Eric (emwine)]

This may be the culprit: [URL="http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10637"]http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10637[/URL]

Regardless, I've been seeing this problem a lot lately. I'm currently evaluating the gstreamer0.10-sdl solution above.

[Danny Staple (danny-orionrobots)]

I am seeing this a great deal, I am also using the nvidia restricted drivers, and have an AMD Turion ml-30 CPU with 3Gb of RAM. The card is a Geforce 6600 with 256 Mb.

The XV fix worked for some things, but not mythtv or miro when they play up (which suggests they are not using gstreamer). Sometimes, the corruption or green display will lead what appears to be a total system hang - however, I have not tried to SSH in when that is the case (on the chance that it is the video card only that is not responding). I have rebooted more than once due to this.

It seems to be fine sometimes, and go completely at others. I have only one monitor connected, but the card has an additional DVI output.

I do not feel it is likely to be wine, because AFAIK I am not running anything under wine and have not in most sessions.

[Danny Staple (danny-orionrobots)]

I thought it might be desktop effects, but since I had already turned them off (that is compiz/beryl stuff) to stop annoying games interactions it is not them.

[Danny Staple (danny-orionrobots)]

Additional observation - this does not affect flash based video (IE youtube) at all. Do they not use the same video surface system as other video playback?

[Even Nedberg (nedberg)]

It has nothing to do with wine, I don't have it installed. It has nothing to do with compiz, I don't have that installed either. I am pretty sure it has to do with the Nvidia driver. I also found this

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/299600

I am using the 100.14.19 driver from the nvidia-glx-new package. I have not tried to roll back to 100.14.11...

[syko21 (syko21)]

Flash video goes through the Adobe Flash Plugin and not through any of the conventional video output channels so it would no be affected by this bug. I can confirm that video does appear messed up with a wine application running and this disappears after a safe exit of the wine application (I am using counter strike as my wine application). Other than that I have noticed a significant decrease in the frequency of the bug since I switched my Default Video Output to SDL and have been more careful with my wine applications.

[Danny Staple (danny-orionrobots)]

The NV forums have a thread on this - http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=98852, and new nvidia drivers - 169.07 may actually fix this issue.

I have also found out that the hang of the machine (to the extent that RSEIUB is not responsive) occurs if the video window display is purple - I am going to try installing the new drivers using the nvidia installer, and see what happens.

[Danny Staple (danny-orionrobots)]

I have removed the restricted modules package, and installed NVIDIA from the 169.07 run package. So far so good - playing video with no issues. It was intermittent, so it may take a day or two before the issue shows up. If this works, it demonstrates that NVIDIA have already fixed the issue:
From their release notes - "Fixed a bug that caused corruption with redirected XV on GPUs without TurboCache support."

[Erik Henriksen (groovomata)]

Yes, I too have had the problem though I do not have two monitors. I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop with an Nvidia GeForce Go 7300 video card using the latest Nvidia drivers installed using Envy. Intermittently my screen will flicker and then video, whether using Skype, Totem player, or vlc will show a scrambled green. Restarting the x servers (<ctrl><alt><backspace>) will resolve the problem until it happens again, perhaps a few days later.
Thanks,
Erik.

[Danny Staple (danny-orionrobots)]

Well I have some good news. I have not seen the issue at all in the
last couple of days. The current nvidia drivers seem to have done the
trick. Any chance of them getting streamlined into the ubuntu
restricted drivers package?

[Matthew Craig (matthew-t-craig)]

Danny, Gotta agree with you that NVIDIA solved the problem with their
new driver version. I had been running NVIDIA's driver instead of the
Ubuntu Restricted driver (remember to lock your kernel version!), and,
yet, I was still having intermittent problems. 11 days ago, when I
saw your most recent message on this bug list, I tried the new
version. Since then, not seen the issue pop up again. Very happy
with the quality, but, now, we have got to get this into the Ubuntu
Restricted driver so everyone else can use it, too.

[Matthew Craig (matthew-t-craig)]

From their release notes - "Fixed a bug that caused corruption with redirected XV on GPUs without TurboCache support."

17 days later and still not seen this issue with the NVIDIA graphics driver.

Ubuntu-X Team: When will we see this feature patched into in the Ubuntu restricted driver?

[STaRMaN (jarizaro)]

Confirmated... the problems is on nvidia driver in restricted-modules.
When will we have this in restricted drivers?

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

There will be no updates to the driver in gutsy, I'm afraid. Thanks for verifying that the bug is fixed with the newer version.