Bruce's Blog

The xorg X windows system seems to have problems with the xv extention. The symptom of this problem seems to be that you can get your desired resolution and color depth but when you try to use applications that use the "xv" extention these applications crash. A couple such reports are in freedesktop.org's bugzilla bug #590.

Video player applications are the most popular users of the "xv" extention. I've noticed that mplayer and totem crashed quite a bit since I had upgraded to Fedora Core 1.92 and then the latest rawhide tree. I had blamed it on prelink and exec-shield issues caused by the fact mplayer and totem use win32 dll files to play some codecs. Then today I noticed that after leaving my system on for a couple of days not even video files with native codecs would play. After prelinking my entire system a few times with different opions and playing with exec-shield settings it became clear that prelink and exec-shield had nothing to do with it.

EDIT: The workaround didn't work. The problem comes back after a couple hours.