Corruption (red horizontal lines) in mozilla plugin 1.0.3

[MerlinsMate]

Hi,

I'm really hoping someone has seen the issue we're experiencing as it's causing us real headaches. We've used vlc mozilla plugin vsn 0.8.6 to play a dvb-t udp network stream (streamed from vlc elsewhere) perfectly for a while, but we now want to display subtitles on screen, which do not work on 0.8.6. We've upgraded our thin client boxes to Debian lenny, and vlc and the plugin to 1.0.3-1. We can now get the subtitles to display within the vlc window on the webpage, but using the "Default" output format, we get red horizontal lines corrupting just the vlc window on the screen. If I boot to a X-term and fire up the vlc UI I can tweak the settings - I'd read that using the X11 output may provide a fix, but using this we just get the video compressed in black and white on the left side of the screen. Using sdl as the output format gives us a clear picture with slightly blurred subtitles, but importantly no corruption. My question is, how do I make the plugin use sdl as it's default output format ? I've tried specifying it in the options...

var options = new Array(":vout=vout-sdl",":aspect-ratio=4:3");

var id = vlc.playlist.add("udp://@239.0.0.1", "BBC News", options);
vlc.playlist.playItem(id);

..but this has no effect (although the aspect ratio option does get used). I've tried setting the output format to sdl in the vlc config file (~/.config/vlc/vlcrc), but it looks like the mozilla plugin ignores this file - is there a separate settings file specifically for the plugin - I couldn't find anything ?

Interestingly the corruption also disappears when we switch on deinterlacing (Bob does the trick), but then subtitle display is choppy. However I've read elsewhere that deinterlacing currently can't be switched on / off on the plugin until v 1.1.0 or above, so this probably doesn't help either. For info, the thin client boxes have VIA chipsets and are using the openchrome (1:0.2.904+) drivers.

Any help, gratefully received...

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

--vout sdl

but you will loose video embedding capabilty. That said, VLC 1.0.3 is not available in Debian stable. So I guess you either screwed up your VLC build badly or your X11 driver is seriously broken or misconfigured.

[MerlinsMate]

Apologies, my mistake, we've upgraded to squeeze, not lenny as reported above, which is why we're on 1.0.3. I tried the solution above, but this seems to have made no difference - I'm obviously doing something wrong somewhere. My script is...

<embed type="application/x-vlc-plugin" pluginspage="http://www.videolan.org" version="VideoLAN.VLCPlugin.2"
width="600"
height="450"
id="vlc">
</embed>
<SCRIPT language="javascript">
<!--
var vlc = document.getElementById("vlc");

var options = new Array("--vout sdl",":aspect-ratio=4:3");

var id = vlc.playlist.add("udp://@239.0.0.1", "BBC News", options);
vlc.playlist.playItem(id);

vlc.video.subtitle=1;

-->
</SCRIPT>

Ideally we'd like to get this working with the X11 output, so I'm also looking at the X11 config settings. For X11 output to work sucessfully, should anything be specifically enabled / disabled ?

[xtophe]

Do you happen to have install ffmpeg(libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat) from an unofficial repository ?
Is libavutil50 present on your system ?

[MerlinsMate]

Hi Xtophe,

Yes - libavutil50 is installed (5:0.5+svn2)

Looking at the ffmpeg.org website 0.5 looks to be the latest official release ?

[xtophe]

uninstall your unofficial libav* including libavutil50 and use the ones from debian and it will work

[MerlinsMate]

Xtophe - you're a star !

I uninstalled libavutil50, which also removed vlc and the plugin. I then attempted to reinstall it, and the same version was going to be installed. I found I had the debian-multimedia repository in my source list which I removed and tried again. Now when I run using the X11 output driver, i get the subtitles and no corruption - at last - I've been tearing my hair out for a while on this.

One small problem still remains, and it's a strange one - When the web page loads with the embedded mozilla plugin, it starts streaming with what appears to be the "default" video output (which has the corruption). If I refresh the page, it reloads and the plugin is then using the x11 output which is perfectly fine. Each time the page is refreshed the output toggles between default and x11. Unfortunately our page is set to auto reload every hour. If I find a way to stop this, i'll post it up. Likewise if anyone else knows how to stop the video output toggling on the plugin - i'm all ears !

Thanks again Xtophe - your help is much appreciated !

[MerlinsMate]

Right, I've finally managed to resolve this one.

I worked my way through the video_output modes in VLC and established that the xvideo mode was the one causing the problem (red horizontal lines), so I can only assume from this that when the page refreshed the plugin was toggling between the xvideo and x11 output modes - very strange.

I played around with removing various output modules (found in /usr/lib/vlc/video_output), and finally with the following modules removed, the x11 output is picked up as default and remains that way.

libaa_plugin.so
libcaca_plugin.so
libxvideo_plugin.so
libyuv_plugin.so

I know the libaa and libcaca should have no effect on the above, and that may well be the case, I excluded all but x11 and gradually reintroduced some back in, I got it working before I got to them though, so stopped at that point.

For good measure I also set vout=x11 in ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc, but as has been previously pointed out, the vlc config file gets ignored by the plugin, so I doubt this will be having any effect.

Thanks again to Xtophe for pointing me in the right direction to begin with !