mplayer brightness reduces on playback

[Matt Daubney]

Binary package hint: mplayer

After updating Hardy today, mplayer seems to reduce the brightness of my laptop screen when I start a video. This seems to happen as mplayer disables gnome-screensaver, but when it's enabled again, the brightness doesn't return.

 matt@matts-laptop:~$ apt-cache policy mplayer
mplayer:
  Installed: 2:1.0~rc2-0ubuntu8
  Candidate: 2:1.0~rc2-0ubuntu8
  Version table:
 *** 2:1.0~rc2-0ubuntu8 0
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Laptop is a Dell Inspiron 6400 (one of the ones preloaded with Ubuntu)

[Philipp Rustemeier (12foo)]

I seem to have the same problem, only in my case it turns the brightness up to 100%. My laptop is a Thinkpad R60e. Maybe this is rather a bug in gnome-power-manager, because as far as I can see, mplayer tries to disable both screensaver and power manager, and the power manager controls the brightness, possibly resetting it to a default value. I'm just guessing, though. :)

[Philipp Rustemeier (12foo)]

Strangely enough, the problem stopped when I called "gmplayer" instead of "mplayer". After that, the regular mplayer worked fine, too. Maybe it was something unrelated, though, so I'll see if it comes back up, try it again and then post here.

[Philipp Rustemeier (12foo)]

Well, it doesn't really fix the problem, but it's a workaround of sorts. GMPlayer just set a preference in the mplayer config file to not disable the screensaver, and regular mplayer sticks to that.

[Philipp Rustemeier (12foo)]

Actually, that didn't work at all - the behavior is just sporadic and I can't really reproduce it consistently. It's also happening at other times, such as occasionally while alt-tabbing between windows, so I'm going to look at bugs for gnome power management in general and bother them about it. :)

[Tv (tv42)]

Originally my T61 BIOS was set to have a dimmer backlight when on battery power, and not even xbacklight 100% could bring it back up to full brightness. I changed the BIOS, and now have full brightness on battery.

Except when I run mplayer. It seems that if I run mplayer on battery, my backlight brightness drops and stays down, and when I next run mplayer on AC, I get the full brightness back.

This probably relates to the xv acceleration, somehow.

[Tv (tv42)]

Tested it a bit further, mplayer backend used has no effect. However, I *can* reproduce this with just "xset -dpms". So it is disabling the DPMS, that makes the video card use the lower brightness on battery, even when the BIOS has been set not to lower the brightness.

[Tv (tv42)]

See also #204805.

This should probably be reassigned to Xorg.

[Brian Pitts (bpitts)]

This also happens in Ogle.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom reproducible in 9.04?

[reacocard (reacocard)]

This problem no longer exists for me in 8.10.

[portis (portis24)]

After upgrade to 2.6.28 kernel, my problem is solved.

2008/12/2 Aren Olson <email address hidden>

> This problem no longer exists for me in 8.10.
>
> --
> mplayer brightness reduces on playback
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/201544
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug.
>

[Khashayar Naderehvandi (khashayar)]

I'm seeing this on intrepid with a 2.6.28-kernel.
Something's not quite right here...

[Sur Demir (surdemir)]

I have the same problem on Intel GM965 X3100 running up-to-date 8.10.
Upgrading xserver-xorg-video-intel to 2.5.1 and libdrm to 2.4.1 did not help.
However, disabling DPMS in Monitor section in xorg.conf helped, and now mplayer does not dim display.
So, this looks like a DPMS issue.

[Mingming Ren (portis25)]

I used to have this problem, virtualbox could also reduce brightness.

Now I'm using 9.04 development branch with a 2.6.28 kernel, this bug's
disappeared.

2008/12/19 Sur Demir <email address hidden>

> I have the same problem on Intel GM965 X3100 running up-to-date 8.10.
> Upgrading xserver-xorg-video-intel to 2.5.1 and libdrm to 2.4.1 did not
> help.
> However, disabling DPMS in Monitor section in xorg.conf helped, and now
> mplayer does not dim display.
> So, this looks like a DPMS issue.
>
> --
> mplayer brightness reduces on playback
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/201544
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug.
>

[Sur Demir (surdemir)]

I pulled mplayer from svn trunk hoping to build and see it myself.
The configure script successfully passed DPMS Check, although I had no libxcb-dpms* package installed. So, I installed
libxcb-dpms0, libxcb-dpms0-dev
and rebuilt mplayer from trunk. Now, mplayer does not dim display (no need to disable DPMS in xorg.conf).

[Angel de Jesús Salinas Huerta (elseniordelosacentos)]

Does anyone know how to solve this¿, i tried to instal the newest mplayer but it still continues lo reduce bright

[Enrico Gueli (e-gueli)]

I also had this problem, and solved by downloading mplayer's sources via bazar (1.0rc2) and recompiling it.

[Enrico Gueli (e-gueli)]

I apologize for the last message, it was a false positive: after opening several files, the problem is still there.

[Piotr Czachur (zimnyx)]

Confirmed on ubuntu jaunty.

When starting playback in VLC and mplayer laptop screen brightness is set to lowest possible value.
It's been happening on intrepid and now, jaunty, and is very annoying, because I have to increase brightness manually every time I start playback.

[phcoder (phcoder)]

Same on jaunty. Disabling DPMS helps

[Khashayar Naderehvandi (khashayar)]

I can confirm this on Jaunty, but it seems to be the case only when the "video" kernel module is loaded, not otherwise.

[phcoder (phcoder)]

On my laptop I traced it back to kernel and here is the fix: http://marc.info/?l=linux-acpi&m=124456088526538&w=2

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

reassinging to kernel based on commenter's feedback.

[Leann Ogasawara (leannogasawara)]

Doesn't look like the patch has been accepted into the upstream kernel yet. Setting this to Triaged to track the progress. Once this is merged upstream the Ubuntu kernel will pull it in. Thanks.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

This bug report was marked as Triaged a while ago but has not had any updated comments for quite some time. Please let us know if this issue remains in the current Ubuntu release, http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download . If the issue remains, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Matt Daubney (daubers)]

Patch is commited in linux-2.6.31-git14 as shown in http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13511