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Recently VLC has been having issues displaying video in fullscreen mode. AFAIK, nothing has changed with the video card drivers and it's certainly the same version of VLC. (/me shakes a fist at the repository maintainers)

This has worked without issue in the past. In fact, I've had as many as 6 instances of VLC running, each playing a video. One was always fullscreen on my second monitor, while the others were tiled on my primary monitor. I was able to toggle any of the other 5 into fullscreen mode and the video displayed without issue.

Lately, I've been having trouble running 2 instances in fullscreen mode. (Sometimes, even a single instance will not display the video in fullscreen.) VLC will continue to play the video, but in fullscreen mode I see nothing but a black screen. Sometimes, the video will display if I maximize the VLC window. Other times, I have to settle for a smaller sized window.

I don't know if this is pertinent, but sometimes changing the min/max state of a Firefox window (Minefield, specifically) seemed to allow the troublesome instance to display the video in fullscreen mode. However, that did not prove to be a consistent workaround. Sometimes, it seemed that closing a Firefox window did the trick, though that isn't consistently successful either. (I futzed with Firefox, because with the crazy number of windows and tabs that I normally have open, it regularly hogs about 1 GB of RAM.)

Another bit of funkiness that comes to mind is the fact that my secondary monitor is considered the primary on boot-up. I use xrandr to designate the real 1st monitor as primary after boot-up, as suggested by someone in a question I asked on the Unix & Linux SE site.

Specs:

  • Ubuntu 10.10 w/ Gnome and Compiz
  • 8GB RAM
  • AMD Phenom II 965 Black Edition
  • Asus M4A79 Deluxe mobo
  • XFX ATI Radeon HD 5750 w/ 1GB RAM

VLC is configured to use the hardware overlay for video (as per the default setting)

Does anyone have an idea what may cause this issue or how I may go about troubleshooting it? Right now I have 2 instances of VLC playing, each in fullscreen mode on a separate monitor.

Community
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George Marian
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    @jorge I don't understand how a black screenshot would shed any light on the situation. :) – George Marian Feb 11 '11 at 00:40
  • Yeah it's just hard to visualize where you explain about having multiple instances and on which monitors you want to do what on. – Jorge Castro Feb 11 '11 at 00:49
  • @jorge It doesn't matter which monitor the troublesome instance of VLC is using. Sometimes, an instance that is displaying correctly in fullscreen mode will run into this issue if I toggle fullscreen mode on it. Imagine one monitor displaying a video in fullscreen mode, while the other monitor displays nothing but black and the VLC fullscreen control interface if you hover over it. – George Marian Feb 11 '11 at 00:53
  • It's possible that usage of XVideo is limited, I mean, not more than some given number of X clients can only use XVideo at the same time. I have no idea about VLC but you can test mplayer with "-vo xv" to use XVideo. If you have this bug, try with "-vo x11" (much more CPU usage, no hw scaling then etc) if it works, I guess it's some problem with XVideo extension of X. – LGB Feb 11 '11 at 08:15
  • @LGB Thanks for the input. That gives me some direction for further research. VLC provides various output options, including XVideo and X11. With X11 selected it could display many more videos fullscreen, though with high CPU utilization. Ironically, when I was doing this testing VLC was able to display 2 videos fullscreen while using the XVideo output. – George Marian Feb 12 '11 at 08:48
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  • Turn off compiz (advanced visual effects) in Appearance Preferences. If that does not help try adding the radeon.modeset=0 boot parameter to your kernel command line. Also do you have any PPAs?
    • – komputes Mar 01 '11 at 21:03
  • @kom What about compiz do you suspect would cause this issue? (I'd rather not turn it off completely.) Do you have any links which explain that boot param? (I'm researching it, but if you have info on it that would be great.) The only non-standard PPA I have is one for dropbox. Why do ask about PPAs? – George Marian Mar 01 '11 at 22:15
  • I don't think it's compiz...I think it's multiple tabs for the same website, or a tab for a website and embedded content for a website. I get black screen all the time on vimeo/youtube when I have a facebook embed open and try to browse the primary site. – RobotHumans Mar 20 '11 at 17:53
  • @aking Well, re-enabling compiz sure didn't help. I ran into this problem with just one instance of VLC running. (I selected the "moderate" setting for compiz when I re-enabled it and even turned off the Expo plugin.) At this point, I suspect that it's the composting that is causing the problem. (I'm not sure if it's related, but this last time minimizing all windows helped with the issue. However, I fear that isn't a consistent fix.) – George Marian Mar 25 '11 at 19:53