Oliver Hansen

A techie's not-so-technical weblog

Getting Video To Play After Installing Compiz Fusion

Finally! Finally found out the problem and solution. First a little background…

I’ve decided to try switching over to Linux by using the distribution Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna. Now, I kind of lean towards KDE maybe because of my Windows background and the Linux Mint 4.0 KDE version is still officially beta so there are some issues. Mostly it works great though. And it’s pretty.

One thing that makes it prettier is installing the Envy drivers for your video card (ATI or nVidia). After installing those, I installed Compiz Fusion which is a package that allows you to have all these crazy special effects for your desktop. I’m only using minimal effects because I want to have the balance of efficient and beautiful. After I had everything set up, I ran into a problem with video playback. I would start a video and I would get audio but the window of the video player would be blank or slightly blue. I tried all the players on my system: Kaffeine, Mplayer, and VLC. They all gave the same results. They would display the video full screen though! I searched in Google the first day and didn’t find much but then searched in Linux Mint forums and found another person that had the same issue with an Acer laptop like mine. Either this person never found a solution or they never updated the post to reflect the solution.

Later, I noticed something interesting. I opened a video in Mplayer because the video didn’t seem to play in Kaffeine. I then paused the video and didn’t close Mplayer. Then I opened a new video with Kaffeine and it displayed in the window! So I figured there must be a layer issue or something similar. The video was probably playing on a different layer by default and so was not being displayed. When Mplayer was using that layer already, then Kaffeine picked the next one and that happened to be the one visible without being full screen. It’s my deduction and may be totally wrong.

A little better searching on Google the following day and I found a page describing a fix for video in Compiz Fusion. The person didn’t necessarily have the exact symptoms I had but I decided to try the method and it worked! The solution is basically to choose explicitly the video output for the video player instead of letting it choose. When choosing the x window display as the output device, all my players will now play video in windowed mode and full screen.

Well, I know Compiz Fusion is still not totally stable and neither is Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna KDE so it can be frustrating at times. But for now I’m still trying to stick with it as when things work it’s a great operating system and the freedom to change just about anything you want is wonderful.

A Bird? A Plane? A Flying Man?

A pretty crazy video I saw linked from Slashdot this morning.

Sure looks like fun! A big belly would probably get in the way of the aerodynamics though.

Rodney Mullen Skateboarding Video Clip

This is just one of my all-time favorite skateboarders. Even if you don’t know much about the sport, you can appreciate this guy’s talent.

Cron is Different in FreeBSD and Linux

A while ago I got into updating my FreeBSD installation automatically. Now, I wrote my blog entry but didn’t test the cron part. I found a nice page that explained getting cron running on linux. I’m pretty sure I didn’t search for linux but that’s what I found and I figured most things like this would be the same. I was wrong 🙂

The problem is that in linux you have to specify the user that the command will be run as like
15 * * * * root /usr/bin/command.sh

but with FreeBSD (unix) the command does not need a user specified
15 * * * * /usr/bin/command.sh

Since I had the word “root” after the time-to-run designations I guess cron thought the command to run was “root” and then when that came up as not a command it just finished. I finally decided to take the user’s name out and I got a test script to run. Success! Well, not quite. Seems my actual script needed to have the full path to the command. Well, I put that in and it worked fine. Next thing will be to put the path in the script or crontab so absolute paths of commands will not be necessary.

Give One Laptop To A Needy Child, Keep One For Yourself!

This Christmas (or any time after Nov. 12) you can purchase a neat laptop for your child or yourself and one will be sent to a child in a developing country at the same time! The OLPC project has been an interesting one. Initially their goal was to make a laptop for $100 so that every child in the world could have access to the same information and technology enabling them to learn. The price has gone up since that time to about $188 but it’s still a great idea and the creativity in developing the laptop is quite inspiring as well.

I’m a geek, so just having one of these would be neat. They’re also not bad for children as that is their intended audience.

Starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time in North America. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home.