Lenny - xvinfo: No Adaptors present..
I'm in the last stages of migrating my (mostly legacy) stuff to a newer
laptop and cannot get mplayer to work as well as I had hoped on debian
lenny.
On my previous system with an old ATI Mach64, I specified the XVideo
output driver and was getting pretty decent results.
On the new system, with a fairly current nvidia video card, and the
default ‘nv’ free driver, only the sound appears to work when I stream
TV news channels or play .flv videos.
The only workaround that I have found so far is to use the ‘sdl’ driver
instead of ‘xv’ but the picture is pretty bad and the sound quality is
unacceptable.
I searched for solutions or a workaround and did not see as much as an
explanation.
That's how I learned that there is something in X called ‘XVideo’ and
that in such circumstances, I should run the ‘xvinfo’ command to help
diagnose the problem.
Well, here is the output:
$ xvinfo
X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
no adaptors present
I'm not sure whether it's relevant, but oddly, xdpyinfo informs me that:
...
number of extensions: 30
BIG-REQUESTS
Composite
DAMAGE
...
XTEST
XVideo <-
...
In any event, I ran that same xvinfo command on the old laptop and got
about two screenfuls of output for my trouble, one line accurately
naming my video card somewhere near the top, followed by many lines of
cryptic output.
Is this telling me is that the XVideo extension on the new machine is
not enabled?
I have among other things a Ubuntu 10.10 system on the same laptop and
with the proprietary ‘nvidia’ driver, the xvinfo command produces output
similar to what I am getting on my former machine.
Hoping that this might be a simple case of debian ’lenny’ being too old
for my hardware and that I only needed to be patient and the problem
would take care of itself, I proceeded to boot into debian ‘squeeze’,
but unfortunately, I got the exact same results as on lenny: no video
with ‘xv’, very choppy sound with ‘sdl’, and xvinfo outputs the same
three messages as above.
I am not really keen on installing the ‘nvidia’ driver on the debian
systems, but on the other hand, it would be nice to be able to take
a quick look at the news and such without having to reboot..
Is this situation to be expected, or is there any way I could get this
to work?
All apologies if this is a well-known issue and I did not chance upon
the solution.
If anyone has run into similar problems, maybe they could give me a push
in the right direction?
Thanks,
cj
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