<SOLVED> Fullscreen video freezes everything

[mits]

Hi everybody.
I currently use a PCLOS 2012 KDE clean installation on a (chinese-rebranded) laptop with a NVidia GeForce 9300M GS GPU.
I have a persistent problem. When visual effects are turned off,starting a video with VLC, Mplayer or using Skype video freeze immediately everything, while the sound continues.
Furthermore, when visual effects are on, although video plays, trying to fullscreen any of these apps (I suppose and others as well) gives the same result. Any ideas?

[T6]

hello and welcome to the forum!

the video card, what driver is it using?

[mits]

From the PCC I can see that the Xserver chosen is "GeForce 6100 to GeForce 360", while in the Synaptic I see that the drivers installed are dkms-nvidia-current version 295.53-1pclos2012. I hope these help.

[horusfalcon]

Hi everybody.
I currently use a PCLOS 2012 KDE clean installation on a (chinese-rebranded) laptop with a NVidia GeForce 9300M GS GPU.
I have a persistent problem. When visual effects are turned off,starting a video with VLC, Mplayer or using Skype video freeze immediately everything, while the sound continues.
Furthermore, when visual effects are on, although video plays, trying to fullscreen any of these apps (I suppose and others as well) gives the same result. Any ideas?

First let me say that I'm not familiar with your particular video card, and that Nvidia's equipment is generally good for Linux, but some series can be a bit temperamental.

Good thing that you tried different video players.  Shows the problem is not specific to any one of these, but resides in a layer that is common to all (or, at least, the ones you've tried so far).

I'm wondering if it does this with all video sources.  Try different video sources (i.e., a different video file).  I know that my laptop will do exactly what you're describing when trying to render anything at 1080p, fullscreen or no.  I ran into this while testing files encoded at Hi10P (10-bit depth x264).

You might try disabling Desktop Effects and see if that has any (excuse me) effect on the problem.  Wait... I see you've done that if I'm reading correctly... hmm.

Have you tried another desktop environment (e.g., LXDE, XFCE)?  If not, give it a whirl.  Boot from a LiveCD or just install it alongside your KDE install from Synaptic and change session type when you next log in.

Later On,
D

[mits]

I finally found kind of a workaround. Having the desktop effects on, there is an option which says " Suspend desktop effects on fullscreened applications" or something like this. I unchecked this option and everything works as it should. Since I can fullscreen vlc I consider this problem solved.

Have you tried another desktop environment (e.g., LXDE, XFCE)?  If not, give it a whirl.  Boot from a LiveCD or just install it alongside your KDE install from Synaptic and change session type when you next log in.

I booted a live usb with LXDE and having desktop effects off and starting a video, everything froze (except the pointer) - as sadly expected. Btw I couldn't install compiz in order to turn the desktop effects on so I let it be. A year ago, also, I used the Gnome version in the same machine, until my computer was ... cursed somehow. The same there: Desktop effects off->no video and everything frozen, desktop effects on->video (windowed and fullscreen) ok.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for their replies!