Ubuntu 7.10 Miniclient OSD/Overlay Flip-Flopping

[shugrue]

Hi everyone.
I've been using Sagetv since spring 06.
Started out with Sagetv Server for Windows with PlaceShifter and Client for Windows. A few glitches but worked good enough to warrant further exploration.
Late in the year tried Sagetv for Linux. Ouch. My Linux is rusty.
But I've made a lot of progress.
Currently I have Sage Server Linux 6.3.6 running on Ubuntu 7.10. I also have miniclient 6.3.6 running on the same machine. I have turned my Sagetv Server for Windows into a client with the "-client" switch on a second machine. Saved me from having to buy another license. I also have PlaceShifter for Windows running on a third machine. Both of these Window machines work well.

With that said I would like an audience of linux users to help me with a problem I have seen posted here in the past but never solved.
It has to do with the miniclient window in Gnome acting mighty strange.
What happens is the Sage OSD writes on the overlay and then the overlay over-writes the OSD. This then repeats many many times until the OSD times out and goes off.
This also occures with the Sage menus. Same strangeness.
If I turn 3D on in setup the problem is gone but video playback is degraded both visually and motion wise.
My computer is comprised of an MSI K8MM3 with a Sempron 3300+, 512mb,
nVidia GeForce 5200 FX AGP 128, Hauppauge PVR-150, ATI HDTV Wonder, And a bunch of Western Digital hard drives.
All software is totally up to date.

Once again the OSD and the overlay battle it out for screen time in the miniclient window fullscreen or not.

If anybody has had this problem and solved it please let me know.
I thank you in advance.

[svemuri]

I am in a similar situation running on CentOS 5. I can enabled OpenGL by setting opengl=true or enabling 3D that gets rid of the OSD flipping problem, but the video quality, especially when there is motion (HD) is poor. I would like to know if any one is running 6.3 using XV and not OpenGL.

Thanks
Sarat.

[jreichen]

Have you installed nVidia's restricted video drivers? The open source drivers don't support 3D so you need to install the drivers provided by nVidia. Go to System->Administration->Restricted Drivers Manager to install them.

[shugrue]

I've installed the video drivers right from the nVidia driver download site.
Version 169.07.
Didn't help with this problem at all.
I contacted Sage Customer Support and they suggested the "opengl=true" thing. This is the same as switching on 3D acceleration in settings. Like the second person from the top says, this setting clobbers my processor and I might as well be watching a slideshow.

Anybody else want to weight in on this problem.

[uggie]

I'm having similar problems now but using opengl=true worked for me in the past. Disabling the nvidia-glx-new driver makes the overlay behave but I get no video and I'm assuming my usage is spiking (I didn't actually run top or anything to confirm that). Turning on logging in the placeshifter gives this clue:

Fri 2/1 4:39:41.286 Error loading OpenGLGFXCMD class, reverting to default rendering:java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/media/opengl/GLEventListener

Well crap. I just found the problem. I'm running the placeshifter with logging turned on to try to isolate another problem I've been having, but the default logging line in the startup script doesn't load two files: jogl.jar:gluegen-rt.jar. Wanna bet "ogl" stands for opengl? Adding these two into the debugging line fixes the overlay issue when using the latest restricted driver for me. I haven't tried using anything directly from the nvidia site.

Good luck,
-jason

[doc]

I got this issue after installing the restricted NVidia driver from the manufacturer.

I reverted back to the original Ubuntu driver, and then had to turn off the fancy screen effects, the ones where you get wobbly screens when you move windows etc - as you can see I'm a novice with linux!

[shugrue]

I solved my problem with the OSD flip-flopping by upgrading my video card.
Also, watch out for the pre-configured kernel you boot. The generic kernel works best with my MSI K8MM3 motherboard. And, watch out for overheating components. One of my Western Digital 320gig hard drives was experiencing write and read errors due to overheating and caused bottlenecks thruout the process.

[svemuri]

Which video card did you upgrade to?

[shugrue]

I installed an e-Geforce 7300 GT AGP 8X with 512mb.
This allowed me to enable 3d acceleration in Placeshifter settings.
Everything works pretty good most of the time but occasionally the whole xorg environment hangs while sage is in full screen. I reset with crtl-alt-backspace and everything works again.