Other World

I noticed when I got home that I couldn’t play movies on my laptop. It’s running Fedora 8. I tried running Totem movie player. Got sound, but the screen was just blue. Blue screen of death for Linux I guess, only it didn’t take out my whole laptop. A little research suggested that my Compiz settings might be interfering. Compiz lets me do nifty desktop graphics like full transparency on my terminals and the workspace cube. Turning compiz off didn’t help. The following link got me started: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/16972. I ran gstreamer-properties in a terminal and went to the video tab. I then selected “X Window System (No Xv)” under “Default Output.” That didn’t work.

I then installed xine and gxine to see if it was just a Totem problem. That didn’t work either but it helped later. I changed my search to look for xine issues instead of Totem. From there I found a site that suggested opening the xine_config file. Most distros have this located in your home folder under .gnome2/Totem. In that file I ran a search for “video driver.” I changed the following lines:

#video driver to use
#string, default: auto
#video.driver:auto

to

#video driver to use
#string, default: auto
video.driver:xshm

After rebooting the computer I still wasn’t getting anywhere. But the following forum at least had a good clue to getting something working.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2859

The original poster noted that he could play movies if he had more than one player open at once. So I opened Totem and gxine and started both playing. Both brought up video. Now I can open just one and it works fine. Strange work-around, but video problem solved.

On the down side, my parents home computer is in really bad shape. I had it booting Knoppix and we had started some data backup. But now it won’t boot at all. Unless I figure out why and am able to fix it, that machine may be a lost cause. I should still be able to move the hard drives to another machine to recover the data.