Fixing the garbled video issue in Ubuntu for NVIDIA cards
Some of you (actually a very few I guess), might be experiencing a weird and random issue of having all your videos play garbled or corrupted with lots of pink and green lines. The corruption / garbling also leads to a total freeze at times, for me at least. As an example this is how your video would look like when played in ANY player:

Yeah any, VLC, MPlayer, you name it. Once it starts appearing it appears in everything you play!
I don’t know of a proper bug page for this at Launchpad but I do know the fix. Apparently its something bad in the nvidia-glx-new driver package that makes this happen. So the fix is to roll back to the normal nvidia-glx driver. You can either run the following or just click on the link to do so:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
That should probably fix it (as it has for me). In case someone stumbles here with a better workaround than to lose performance with the removal of the nvidia-glx-new driver, do post it here.
P.s. This is exclusive only to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 I think. Cause I haven’t seen any such issues on Feisty on either of the drivers.
P.s. again. I use a GeForce 7600GT by the way. And this thing was sure a pain in the ___.
Did you try envy? It has version 100.19.23. Try and see if that works. Also install totem-xine and libxine1-plugins.
Kalpik
15 Dec 07 at 8:00 am
Hahaha, that pinkish/purple just makes me laugh. Man, that is funny.
Wendy
15 Dec 07 at 8:00 am
Kalpik - No I haven’t tried Envy so far. But yeah Totem-Xine also failed at it.
Wendy - Its very frustrating not being able to do anything but reset the PC too. Full screen of pink!
Harsh
15 Dec 07 at 9:45 am
I have this problem too. It happen after I execute an app with Wine or an app compiled with libwine like Google Earth. I hope there is another solution because the only way I can get my refresh rate to autodetect correctly is if I install my drivers with Envy. I can’t manualy install them, it doesn’t work. I’ve tried everything in faqs and forums.
Grrrururu
5 Jan 08 at 8:48 am
Same issue for me… After a restart everything is OK, but at some point: ping and green
I can reproduce it if I switch the video-whatever-player to fullscreen and back, or by switching desktops. one more note: I’m using a dualscreen setup.
promd
28 Feb 08 at 1:44 am
Irritating, but you don’t need to reboot.
You can either kill X with ctrl-alt-backspace, or even easier: ctrl-alt-numpad plus/minus to change resolution back and forth again, and it is fixed =)
Mikal
23 Jul 08 at 9:00 pm
The problem must have disappeared by now. Am over using distro’s for their name now, its all GNU/Linux to me.
Harsh
23 Jul 08 at 9:31 pm