VLC Green Screen and Jumping Audio

[dj_bridges]

I have been a happy user of VLC for some time now, but just bought a DVD series boxset (Battle Star Galactica if you must know) and am finding that some of the DVDs don't play back on VLC. Instead the audio skips every couple of seconds and the whole screen is green. Anyway some series play fine and others don't. The only difference I can see is the aspect ratio, with the problematic series having been shot in 1.77:1 anamorphic wide screen. I am running KDE MiniMe and am fully updated. I did a search, but couldn't find out anything from the vlc forums etc. Anyone got any suggestions for how to resolve this / observed this on their system?

[Phil]

Send the set to me and I will test them.....

Try the problem cases with smplayer and maybe kaffeine.
Maybe try backing them up with handbrake.

Another suggestion from elsewhere:

"in vlc, load the video file, right click the screen, go to aspect-ratio and change it to 16:10"

[dj_bridges]

I live in Zambia so postage may be a bit steep Phil ;-)

Just downloaded the other players and will test them when I get home!

[Phil]

A very long time ago I lived over the border in Blantyre (in Dr Banda's day)

[dj_bridges]

Its a small world Phil! Look us up if you are passing through this area.

In the meantime unfortunately none of the players seem to be able to playback these DVDs. Will try ripping them, but am not hopeful as everything else plays fine. Will also test on another machine when I get a chance.

Any other ideas??

[Phil]

Did you try this?

"in vlc, load the video file, right click the screen, go to aspect-ratio and change it to 16:10"

Once something is loaded you can change the aspect ratio.

Handbrake is good for backing up video files.

[dj_bridges]

Sorry Phil, meant to say that I also tried every possible aspect ratio and nothing made any difference... This is very strange!

[Phil]

More ideas:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1691499

If I play a video in VLC 1.1.4 (repo version) I get the green screen with default options. If I go into the Preferences and uncheck "Accelerated Video Output (Overlay)" or manually specify X11 for my output module then it plays fine.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=41646

..and..
Have you tried mplayer? According to MPlayer 1.0rc3 release - it support 10-bit H264 videos. And for a nice GUI for mplayer, you could checkout smplayer

[Just17]

Check that you have libdvdcss2 installed (also  libdvdnav4 and libdvdread3 & 4)

[dj_bridges]

Happy New Year to you Just17, and thanks for sticking with this thread. Sorry for delayed response, but have been away on holiday. I had everything installed except for libdvdread3, which I have just installed. Will test again when I get home....