Flash before VLC playback.

[Love_Sex_Magic]

I'm experiencing a sudden black flash before video play back with VLC. The whole 3 screens just flash black and come back, and then the video plays fine in VLC. This doesn't happen with other media players, such as mPlayer and Totem.

I'm running an XFX Radeon 5450 (ATi) with the propriety 10.7 drivers. Running 3 17" (1280x1024) in "EyeFinity" (3840x1024). I've had a look on the unofficial bug thingy for ati drivers for linux, and there is a bug back from 2008. The bugzilla seems to be dead, nothing happening to the bugs, So I thought I'd ask here, as I've been lurking around the forums for sometime now. Any way here's a link to the bug I found.

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=855

Here's a quick video I just made showing what happens. Uploaded to youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzDtcJtgeS0

Just wondering if anyone has any ideas, of tips to start looking to try and solve this little issue, I've spent hours and hours looking though xorg, syslog and other logs in /var/log/ and nothing seems to stand out.

[kernelOfTruth]

I get the same, albeit only with 1 screen connect

nothing to be concerned about

it seemingly is initiating video playback stuff in the driver since it only happens the first time I play a video with VLC at a running session/per uptime

[Forbidden]

I had/have the same issue. One important thing I noticed: It would only occur on DisplayPort connected screens, not DVI connected screens. (I even converted one from DisplayPort to DVI to confirm this)

This was happening to me with Ubuntu 9.10, so I tried upgrading to 10.4, still happened.

However, about an hour ago, I just installed a new set of libraries/binaries of VLC and Gstreamer. It's the "Cutting Edge Multimedia" PPA, which includes v1.2 and hardware acceleration and all that. Oddly enough, it stopped the screen-blanking-when-video-starts when starting both VLC and GStreamer videos, but not when starting up MPlayer or Xine.

https://edge.launchpad.net/~nvidia-vdpau/+archive/cutting-edge-multimedia

(It mentions nvidia in the url there, but it's also for ATI.)

[Love_Sex_Magic]

However, about an hour ago, I just installed a new set of libraries/binaries of VLC and Gstreamer. It's the "Cutting Edge Multimedia" PPA, which includes v1.2 and hardware acceleration and all that. Oddly enough, it stopped the screen-blanking-when-video-starts when starting both VLC and GStreamer videos, but not when starting up MPlayer or Xine.

Thank you sir for sharing that information with me. This seems to have solved the issue with VLC for me too. Only time will tell how long it lasts till something else brakes it.