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VLC, MPlayer both display garbled videos

Submitted by Druss on Mon, 2007-11-12 22:00

This site is fast dwindling into a Linux help site :S

Anyway, today's issue relates to a rather odd video issue I've been facing on an infrequent basis. Every now and then all video on my Gutsy box just goes out of whack. Playing any file which would have played fine 10 minutes earlier would display a screen full of garbled lines. The audio is always fine.

Restarting the system fixes it. But, this is obviously a pain in the arse. A better solution I came up with was to use the "Switch user" option. I just create a new session, get to the login screen and switch back (closing the temporary session) to my original session and all videos play fine once again.

Very odd, eh? Looks like a driver issue for my graphics card.

Update: Besides garbled video, another symptom related to the same issue is where the video wraps around from the left to the right side of the screen.


Jubal, did you ever find a permanent solution to this? I've been experiencing exactly the same issue and have been restarting GDM to clear up the problem.

I've actually not been seeing this issue off late most likely because I've been watching most of my videos on Windows. I will update this post if I get any more information.