Placeshifter on Ubuntu - no video on playback

[dflachbart]

Hi,

so I got this nice Asus EEE PC from Santa, and I'm going on a short trip tomorrow. Of course, first thing I did was to install Placeshifter . The UI starts up fine, but when I try to play back any video (tv mpg recordings or even avi files) I only get a black screen, everything else like music, photos etc works fine. I opened one of the TV recordings with the Linux video player, and it plays without problem.

Now, I am not really a Linux expert, and pretty much lost. I created a miniclient log file, and it seems that mplayer is crashing. Any quick ideas ?

Thanks,

Dirk

[dranockcir]

Hi,

I have it working on eeePC 900 with Intrepid. Go to Add/Remove, choose All Available Applications in the Show dropdown, type "restricted" in the Search box then check Ubuntu Restricted Extras and Apply Changes. You may want to rerun the deb installer for Sage again when that is finished.

Hope that helps!


Rick

[dranockcir]

Sorry but I should have said that I have 6.4.8 working on an eeePC 900 with Intrepid. Both 6.5.6 and 6.5.7 both produce no video or audio even though the status bar indicates that data is streaming. I have bug reported it, it also happens on a Dell Inspiron 710m laptop.

Rick

[l3nn0n]

I tried to install the linux placeshifter on my son's machine the weekend and I have the same problem. Is there a fix/ workaround for this? Or a repository where I can obtain the previous revision?

[madas]

Ubuntu 8.1...same problem here

Mon 2/23 16:14:45.019 stderr:MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: flip_page
Mon 2/23 16:14:45.019 stdout:ID_SIGNAL=11
Mon 2/23 16:14:45.020 stderr:- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
Mon 2/23 16:14:45.020 stderr: Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
Mon 2/23 16:14:45.020 stderr: disassembly. Details in DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html#bugreports_crash.
Mon 2/23 16:14:45.020 stderr:- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
Mon 2/23 16:14:45.020 stderr: It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
Mon 2/23 16:14:45.021 stderr: gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
Mon 2/23 16:14:45.021 stderr: DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
Mon 2/23 16:14:45.021 stderr: won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.

[boojiboy]

You might try WireShark to see what the traffic looks like.
From the log, MiniClient can't correctly discover the Server?

[madas]

it definately sees the server.

I also get about 1 second of audio out of the player before this error appears.

Other media (non-sage) works fine.

[dranockcir]

SageTV is aware of the problem. I bug reported it and had a few emails back and forth with logs but no solution yet. I am able to run version 6.4.8 Placeshifter fine on the same hardware but not the latest 6.5 versions. I have an Asus eeePC 900 (have to turn off desktop effects) and a Dell Inspiron 710m that have no audio or video BUT do show that data is streaming in the status bar.

Try 6.4.8 to see if it works for you until they figure out what's wrong.

Rick

[madas]

Anyone have a download link for 6.4.8 ?

[dranockcir]

Here is link to deb file for Placeshifter 6.4.8

http://www.sage.tv/postDL.php?tmpFil...6.4.8_i386.deb

found it from this thread...

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22906

Rick

[boojiboy]

Thanks dranockcir! Just purchased this last night for Linux. Ubuntu is so far pretty slick and I'd like to stick with it if possible.

[l3nn0n]

6.4.8 works great. Thanks for the help!

[madas]

hmm..I still just get a black screen.

error while loading shared libraries: libfaac.so.0

I'm running x64 ubuntu and I just did a dpkg --extract on the package

libfaac.so.0 is in /usr/lib

if I run mplayer from the newer versions then I don't get this missing library message.

any thoughts?

[boojiboy]

Hmmm...I'm not sure about your set up but I also had a black screen playing until I installed the ATI Catalyst Control Center for Linux.
6.4.8 works for me...

[madas]

seems to be a particular dependancy for Sage's version of mplayer. The default ubuntu mplayer runs fine.

Unfortunately this is missing some of the parameters required for sage

[boojiboy]

Interesting, didn't realize they use a modified version of mplayer. Is that the only player that works with SageTV?

I just did a fresh install of Ubuntu and 6.4.8 Placeshifter. The screen switches to all black when I maximize (crtl+shift+F) but I haven't tinkered enough with it yet to see what's going on.

[madas]

should we open a bug request on the new version?

[boojiboy]

Originally Posted by madas

should we open a bug request on the new version?

Sit back. Relax.

Originally Posted by dranockcir

SageTV is aware of the problem. I bug reported it and had a few emails back and forth with logs but no solution yet. I am able to run version 6.4.8 Placeshifter fine on the same hardware but not the latest 6.5 versions. I have an Asus eeePC 900 (have to turn off desktop effects) and a Dell Inspiron 710m that have no audio or video BUT do show that data is streaming in the status bar.

Try 6.4.8 to see if it works for you until they figure out what's wrong.

Rick

[madas]

anyway to find out what command line params sage passes to mplayer when it launches.

If I run sage, let it crash, then run mplayer (sage ver of mplayer) and point at /tmp/stvbuf***.dat then I can watch videos fine.

I wanted to run mplayer with all the sage params to see what kills it, and also add -v to get verbose...any help appreciated!

Thanks

[agitate]

Originally Posted by madas

anyway to find out what command line params sage passes to mplayer when it launches.

Once mplayer is running use ps:

ps -C mplayer -o args

If mplayer crashes immediately, not giving you a chance to run ps, then you can simply replace the binary with a shell script that echoes out the parameters to a temporary file. Something like this (run from the sagetv directory with mplayer in it):

# Move the mplayer binary before we replace it. ONLY RUN THIS LINE ONCE!
mv mplayer mplayer-bin

# Create the script (command runs over two lines so careful pasting it)
echo 'echo $@ > /tmp/mplayer-sagetv-debug.log\n'\
`pwd`'/mplayer-bin "$@"' > mplayer

# Make it executable
chmod 755 mplayer

Once sage has executed mplayer again, you will find the parameters in the /tmp/mplayer-sagetv-debug.log file. Hope that works, I've not tested it with sage and mplayer, but I've employed the same technique with other problems.

Cheers