Articfacts when playing DVDs

[Scooterboy]

I'm using 0.8.4 and the sound issues (wrong discrete channels during DVD menus) I was having are corrected.

However, there seems to be a bug that is affecting video quality. There are occasional artifacts, small areas, or "flakes" of several colors, that appear and disappear seemingly randomly in the VLC window. This is especially evident when watching video with night or space scenes as in Star Wars. Very distracting. Could this be a Core Video issue? These artifacts are evident at all CPU speed settings.

VLC 0.8.4 on an Apple PowerBook 17" 1.5GHz G4, 2GB RAM, 128 MB VRAM on ATi Radeon Mobility 9700, M-Audio Sonica Theater and 5.1 powered surround system.

[gusax]

I too have these artifacts. I only play back hdtv-transport streams (1080i and 720p) but they are mpeg2 just like dvds.

Random flakes (mostly green) that are most visible on darker areas but they are appearing throughout the movie regardless of background color.

I believe the flakes were "introduced" in 0.8.4. (still there on 0.8.4a).

They are visible regardless which deinterlacing i use.

vlc 0.8.4a Powermac G5 2x2GHz, 2GB ram, Ati radeon 9600 128MB, 5.1 surround

[The DJ]

The artefacts are an old bug in the compiler that we use to build the program. Due to the fact that we had to turn in our old "OSX build" machine just before the release, we didn't get time to upgrade the new setup fully, causing this bug to resurface (it was also present in several 0.7.* releases)

[Scooterboy]

DJ, are you sayiing that you no longer have an OS X machine on which to test? How about putting up a specific donate button for needed specific hardware on the Videolan.org website? Democracy Now! did this when they needed to purchase PowerBooks and camcorders for video production. If you did this, I would be more than happy to donate $5, $10, or $20 towards an OS X test machine. I never use DVD Player anymore as VLC is far superior. I'd wager that many Mac users feel the same and wouldn't want to see OS X development cut back due to the lack of test machines (G3, G4, G5, and Intel).

[gusax]

DJ probably just means that since they just replaced their old OS X machine with a brand new G5, there wasn't enough time to switch compilers and stuff before releasing 0.8.4a and thus the bug resurfaced.

I just tried the latest nightly build and the little flakes are gone so it's already fixed. Good work

[fkuehne]

A bit more difficult actually:
The bug is fixed on the G5 by default, but we couldn't use it because it doesn't run 10.2.x. We had to compile VLC on 10.2.x to make sure that it runs on that OS. That's why I had to do that on a 266 MHz iMac G3 next to me (what took about 14 hours at full load...), which was hardly ever used for software development and therefore wasn't equipped with the patch