Media players not displaying video track.

[alexe53]

Hey all, 

Just got my Pandora today and it is nothing short of the best thing I have ever owned. I can't believe it's taken me this long to find out that they existed!

Everything has been working perfectly with the exception of videos. I have tried two different video players (VLC and  SMPlayer 2) and although the audio track runs perfectly there is no video at all. Just a black screen. 

I'm new to linux so I'm probably missing something really simple. Any ideas on what's wrong?

Thanks, 

Alex

 

[WizardStan]

Did you install the Community Codec Pack?

If not, that's your problem. If so then it's possible the window is too large for the screen. I'm not sure about VLC but I know MPlayer has weird issues when the video is larger than the frame buffer; it shouldn't, but it does. What resolution and format is the video in? Try starting playback and then telling the player to go fullscreen, or reduce the window to half size, and try a video with lower resolution, something 480p or lower. There are also other work arounds we can talk about if that turns out to be the problem.

Note that even when video works, the Pandora struggles with h264 encoded video over 480p anyway. DivX encoded video works fine, but h264 is a very CPU intense encoding. With certain settings I've successfully gotten some reasonable playback at 720p, but it's noticeably not very good.

 

[alexe53]

No I hadn't installed the codec pack. I've done it now and some of the problems seem to have been fixed. I tested both players with some lower resolution videos and they're running fine now. 

Having viewed some 360/480p videos I'm pretty sure I wont be needing and HD playback. They look pretty awesome on the small screen anyway

Thanks for your help mate, my Pandora is now perfect! 

 

[WizardStan]

Awesome, glad to hear you're enjoying it

 

[FBnil]

also note that in VLC some files show video only in fullscreen (press F for full screen).

 

[Schugy]

Also ensure there is enough free memory left for the framebuffer.

Here's what dmesg shows:

[493643.008697] omapfb omapfb: failed to allocate framebuffer
[493643.008941] omapfb omapfb: realloc fbmem failed

 

[TrashyMG]

Also I find The SMPlayer2 to be very good and less glitchy then VLC.