Harsh J

If your mplayer doesn’t seem to be zooming into, or expanding a video to fit the screen under fullscreen mode (Shows black bands all around the video, preserving its actual size), then it’s probably because of the video driver your mplayer is using. I had set mine to xv sometime back in order to play a few Real media files, and though it did zoom in on those files it confounded me when I tried other normal video files like AVI, etc on it.

The solution is to switch the video driver (Preferences – Video tab) to x11, which supports zoom.

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 ___.