Totem changes system video hardware.

[rew]

Binary package hint: totem

A few people have encountered totem suddenly (after an upgrade) displaying weird colors or just a black window.

This was caused by a "contrast" preference setting in totem changing to "0" after the upgrade (instead of the default "midscale").

The issue here is not that the contrast setting suddenly changed, but that totem seems to leave its contrast settings somewhere in the hardware resulting in other players like mplayer and vlc also displaying weird colors (with the open source driver) or a black window (with the proprietary video driver).

My analysis is that totem sets up some sort of pixel-processing pipeline, that includes its contrast pipeline. You could accuse mplayer and vlc of not properly initializing that pipeline because they seem to use totem's. But I think they simply don't use that feature, so they may not know about it. I think that totem should leave the hardware as it found it, and properly set the pipeline back to its original state.

This was a friends system. I think it has an NVIDIA video card (onboard, AMD X3 processor).

[rew (r-e-wolff)]

The bug was observed on a friends system that suffered the "inadvertent contrast-set-to-zero" problem. I can reproduce it on my system. Start totem on any video, click edit->preferences->display .Slide the contrast to zero or very low, close totem, and start mplayer on the same video.

mplayer -vo x11 <filename> will display correctly, while mplayer -vo xv <filename> does not.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, it has been some time without any response or feedback in this bug report and we are wondering if this is still an issue for you with the latest release of Ubuntu the Natty Narwhal, May you please test with that version and comment back if you're still having or not the issue? Please have a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/download to know how to install that version. Thanks in advance and sorry for the late response.

[rew (r-e-wolff)]

Yes, my "howto" that I posted as comment #1 still works. And the bug is present on my Natty home system.