The VideoLAN Forums

Hi all,
I wanted to ask if anyone else is having an issue playing video when the screen of a tablet pc is rotated to portrait mode. I have a Toshiba R15 S829 Tablet PC.

In my case, whenever the screen is rotated the video screen is appropriatedly sized (to the original size of the video) and then contains garbage. The audio continues to play normally.

Some Observations of this phenomenon are
1. This problem is unique to vlc and mplayer, winamp, itunes and windows media player do play the files normally.
2. My tablet has an intel garphics card, on my office destop, which has an nVidia graphics card, there is no such problem on VLC player when I rotate the screen. So the problem depends also on the underlying hardware.
3. I was watching the xgl video from Novell in winamp, after closing winamp and immediately playing a file in vlc, the garbage in the window had the words Novell.

Can anyone comment on this?

I want to help the developers in this if I can , but I am a hardware engineer and have only elemnetary C knowledge.




Regards
S M

Sounds like a graphics driver issue. Try changing VLC to not use overlay mode.

If the Video Transformation filter has been turned on it will rotate the file by 90 degrees.

You can reset VLC's preferences or change the setting in Preferences, Video, Filters and uncheck the Video Transformation filter, then press Save and close the player.

I also think it is a driver issue, or atleast with my graphics card, the problem doesn't happen on my nVidia graphics card at at the office.

I did remove vlc preferences, uninstall etc. and I did not apply a 90 degree rotation or any other video filter.

I did find the answer in another part of the forums. I had tried direct3d and Windows GDI output for video output. It seems that opengl works perfectly.

So in the end, if you have a intel graphics card on a tablet, it is best to configure opengl output for now.

But this does increase my cpu usage for vlc. Still it is better than using WinAmp or Windows (Windoze) Media (Non-)Player certified to work with all (Never) "Play for Sure" TM DRM based media players.

Now if only I could also figure out how to make mplayer work.

This is a minor bug, but irritating for average non-geek users, most will never go into the fourms to find an answer.

This question is to the developers, Can the configuration file be modified to choose opengl by default automatically for intel graphics cards?

I would like to help with testing further on this, but I have no idea how to compile vlc on windows. My starting point is to start with cygwin and the howto on developers.vlc.org. But I am a hardware engg and if someone can give more pointers on how to solve this problem, please give me the links.

Thanks
S M

From everything you have described, there are only two things it could be.

1. Your DirectX version is not current.

2. Your Video card's drivers need updating.

When the drivers do not communicate properly with DirectX the resolve is either OpenGL or the GDI interface but unfortunately either of these choices leaves you with high CPU usage.

I will admit the the rotation is a new twist though.

I have an Acer C300 tablet PC also with an intel embeded graphic.
And VLC does not work for me in any non default screen orientation.

Does anyone know ehere to downlaod an driver update for this intel shipset graphic (its the old pentium M architecture)

Owen